Family Pictures

Dave takes a few last photos at his dad's place, standing on the dumpster that they filled as they cleaned out the place. 

I took this photo from the car window in the driveway just as we left at 8:30 p.m.

Dave's grandmother Mamere wrote this label on a roll of negatives: "Vermont '56 family pictures John in summer uniform excellent!"

These turned out to be Dave's grandparents, aunt and uncles on a beach sometimes and posed with a young woman who neither Dave nor his sister recognized (and who I suspect might have been their uncle John's once- upon a- time fiancé).

Dave was a baby once, a long time ago.  The first boy, his parents took approximately sixty thousand photos of everything he did. (This one looks like that because I was scanning it from some negatives.

In fact, that was my job this trip, sitting and scanning slides and negatives, because I hurt my knee--stepping up onto a stair with an unusual height--on the very first day we arrived. No matter. Dave's dad had about 10,000 slides, boxes and boxes of them, mostly from his time as a history professor when he used them for lectures. Still, there were about another few thousand slides that were personal, as well as the negatives from photos he took going back to the early 60s and family photos on negatives like the one Mamere wrote on above.)

Dave's dad took so many photos of him, it was funny.  Dave's sister remarked on it that there were hardly any of her because she was the second child.  Maybe.  Even after she arrived, the photos of Dave out number the photos of her by about ten to one. 

Such is her personality, I told Dave that if the situation were reversed, she would comment continuously on it, "There are so many more photos of me than you! I wonder why! I wonder why they wouldn't take as many photos of you as they did of me! So strange!"

Family.