Photographs as Memory Joggers

In thinking about a memory jogger for this session, I remembered a poem that I had written years ago in Phyllis Koestenbaum’s writing class. The assignment, if I remember it correctly was that you should find an old family photograph and have a conversation with it . Since this was an assignment for a poetry class, the next step was to edit the conversation down into a poem. If I were working with the same picture today, I would probably write something entirely different. At the moment, I am interested in memoir as something on the order of an archeological dig, so I would be more interested in carefully looking at the picture and thinking about what those details tell me about what was actually going on in that time period--just describing who is in the picture, where they were and following whatever thoughts come to me.

The picture I worked with was a little brownie box camera snapshot made in some forgotten park probably in San Marcos, Texas. (Or was it a graveyard in Burnet, Texas?) Wherever it was, the players are the same. The picture is of my Grandmother Alexander and all her grand children. The grandmother is wearing her sunbonnet. The girl children are also wearing sunbonnets—except for my sister Alice who had curly hair. Today I would be more likely to be thinking about the role bonnets played in my life. Mama, who had fair skin and tended to blister, always wore one when she worked in her garden. In Texas, even as recently as 1935, there were some pretty strong opinions on what style of sunbonnet was the correct way to make a bonnet. (I wrote the sunbonnet section yesterday. Today my mind would connect me to my cousin Ed who is in the picture looking very like Huck Finn.)

The difference between talking with a photograph and detailing one for me, is the conversation leads to tapping into my present emotional state and thus narrows down the focus to my often traveled thought processes. Focusing on the details of the photograph and just describing who is in the picture, and following whatever thoughts come to me helps me get past the first emotional response I experience when looking at the picture and opens my mind up to thinking about things I may have given little thought to at the time and this leads to my connecting with information I have stored in my mind that I have more or less forgotten. Either is course is fine. There is probably as much truth in the poem about what a short straw I drew in this life as there would be in a memoir about the way I remember the world in ‘35. Sometimes we feel one way, sometimes another.

I find that talking with a photograph is apt to bring the grumpy out in me. Grumpy can be entertaining, or a little self-indulgent.

Just because I went to the trouble of finding the old poem, I am going to patch it into this memory jogger.

EASTER '35

This is a portrait of my family
Grandmother and cousins
we do not smile

Grandmother does not like
smiling photographs

Although she believes
spending money on jim cracks is a waste
we will hunt store bought eggs
someone has hidden in the grass

Children should enjoy the traditions.

Alice is the brightest
She will find more eggs than anyone
She will be encouraged to keep them all

I am the youngest
My basket is like the others
but I am not expected to find any eggs
My father, whom I call Charley,
will show me where he has hidden a special egg
all chocolate covered
wrapped in gold foil

We do not believe in competition.