Slides: Seeing my reflection in a hazy mirror

One of the many fond memories I have of growing up were those Saturday nights in Milwaukee when Dad would get out the projector and show slides on a stand-up screen in the living room. It was almost as good as going to the movies but in this case it was our faces up on the big screen as opposed to say, John Wayne's or Steve McQueen's. Dad would work through trays of slides of his days in the National Guard or of family gatherings past. So on my 18th birthday when my parents gifted me with a Canon AE-1 35mm camera it only seemed normal to have the pictures I took developed into the same form. In fact, my first two years' worth of photographic images with that camera were all done in slides. But I soon learned that hauling out the projector, setting up the screen that was often uncooperative at staying up and getting any audience to sit down and watch slides with me was a dead-end proposition. In time all those boxes of slides got relegated to a bigger box, which became some of the assorted baggage that our family would lug around whenever we pulled up stakes and migrated elsewhere. But since we haven't done that in nearly 18 years, it's been sitting in an alcove in the guestroom practically forgotten about.

In December, however, I purchased a digital film and slide converter and a few weeks ago I finally took it out of its box and began working its magic. Images that I took back in the early 80s are finally seeing the light of day. As I have worked my way through the cache I have felt at times something like an archeaologist on a dig of some ancient ruin that no on else knows about. And as I see what has been hidden for nearly 30 years my emotions have run the gambit between excitement and ambivalence, laughter and chagrin, embarrassment and surprise depending upon the image and the feelings that the memory that it touches evokes. It's been like unearthing a certain stratum of my life after decades of benign forgetfulness and being reminded of moments that I can scarcely write about without feeling a certain wistfulness or melancholy. Or shame.

I began breaking in my camera almost from Day 1. The very first picture I took was of my brother, Jim. It's late afternoon in early May and he's out in front of the house swinging away with his bat no doubt listening to Bob Uecher give the play-by-play of a Brewers' game on the radio. He strikes a batting pose for me that is reminiscent of one of those Topps baseball cards he used to collect. He's wearing his Brewers' batting helmet with the funky logo they introduced in the late 70s. At the same time, he's wearing his Packers gold-sleeved warm-up jacket. Yeah, that was Jim: ready for a fast ball or a long bomb. It's hard to believe that he's been gone nearly ten years now.

The next assorted images were taken in the backyard. Here's one of my dad working in his garden. In those days, I could have cared less what he was doing back there but now that I have a garden of my own to tend, I can't help but think maybe I might have learned something had I been paying attention. Other slides I took that afternoon captured permanently the splashes of color from all that was in blossom behind our house during that spring of 1980 - the apple tree and the hydrangea and lilac bushes.

I took several pictures of my dog, Star, that day. She was a shepherd-collie mix who clearly enjoyed having her picture taken. She strikes a regal pose and waits patiently as I click away. She was always a temperamental dog that you could never be comfortable with strangers around. A few years later when I went off to college in Chicago, a month afterward she had to be put down for mangling up our neighbor's Schnauzer. I had no way to get home and Dad was at work so Mom was alone when she made that last trip to the vet with Star. All I have left of her are these pictures and her collar now sitting in one of the many boxes that are marked "memorabilia" moldering away in my basement.

A week or so must have passed before the next two pictures were taken. They are of my girlfriend at the time, Vicki. They capture her wading in the waters of Lake Monona in Madison. If I remember right, it was a warm Sunday afternoon in May and we must have gone for a drive. We stopped at Law Park to sit by the lake and impulsively she decided to wade in. I don't remember anything else of our afternoon together othre than she whispered in my ear if I had noticed that she was going bra-less. I hadn't. But, of course, I did now. Nothing unseemly happened following that revelation. There is no other story that lies behind those images. We sat by the lake and then I took her home. But it's funny to me that all these years later that when I saw that picture again for the first time in nearly 31 years on my computer screen at home a few weeks ago, I instantly heard an echo of the fear and awe I experienced that afternoon of hearing such a disclosure. No other girl had ever been so forward with me.

It was, of course, totally unfair of her to share such a secret with a young man who is attempting (badly) to be cool on the outside as if he heard that quite frequently while on the inside he's like Spock undergoing Pon farr. A woman can say such a thing and in the same breath talk about how her parents annoy her but a guy - especially one like me - hears nothing more of whatever else she says. That's all he hears and tribute to this is that 30-some years later all I remember about that afternoon is her off hand comment: "It's fun to go bra-less." At the time I was fully persuaded that she was "the one" (as if an 18-year old can even have a grid for such a thing.) We've remained friends over the years - (Facebook ones, too) - since those days when we dated and (briefly) were engaged. I will always be grateful that our two lives intersected because it was through her family that I was introduced to Jesus.

That May all sections of Mrs. Erickson's Senior English class took a coach bus down to Chicago to pay a visit to the Art Institute there. Mrs. E was all about getting us immersed in culture. It was my first visit to the Windy City and I was wowed by the sheer height of the buildings downtown. I snapped off pictures of Chagall's Four Seasons Mosaic Wall, a few from inside the Institute, several from atop the Sears (now Willis) Tower. My favorite of that journey, however, was the image I serendipitously captured of a pigeon aloft above the Calder's "Flamingo" sculpture outside the Federal building. It reminds me of the image the Gospel writers convey of the Holy Spirit coming to rest like a dove upon Jesus. Even the few pedestrians making their way across the plaza seem captivated by the sight as if this sort of thing happens only once in a century.

Every Memorial Day as long as I can recall, our family drove up to Lake Lucerne located in Forest County in northern Wisconsin right on the edge of the Nicolet National Forest. My grandparents had a cottage there and time immemorial aunts, uncles, cousins and assorted relatives would gather "up north" on Memorial and Labor Day weekends (and for us, every other 4th of July weekend) and squeeze into this oversized shack for a three-day lark. I took my camera that Memorial Day weekend of 1980 and went for a walk in the woods on the west side of County W. The trilliums were in bloom and trilliums were Grandma's favorite. The woods were alive with color - and ticks. Following my hour long trek, I managed to harvest a host of them that my mom or dad or grandma picked off of me for the rest of the weekend like I was a little monkey out on th savannah.

As I continue to feed slides to the converter there is the lake glistening under the late spring sun, there are the islands that always seemed so mysterious to me, there is the gathering place where countless bonfires and "Indian ceremonials" were held and there is the black lab Pal, faithful companion of my grandparents from my boyhood to adulthood. Every image is rife with memories of afternoons spent out on the lake fishing or swimming out to the rock pile or skinny dipping at night under a sky bespectacled with stars.

After my grandfather passed, my grandmother, who did not drive, had no way to keep going there and so she sold it to some young couple. Wanting something far more spacious and modern they tore down the old cabin and built a new one but because of some archaic zoning law they had to leave one of the old walls standing. They left the south wall up where the kitchen sink had stood and, on the other side of the refrigerator, the old oil furnace. In the early 90s, Linda and I were driving through the area and decided to make a detour over to the lake. No one was home but the light was on so I looked in through the door. It was strange seeing this little living space that once was so full of Grandma's presence so empty of it now. I then did something that I probably should feel a tinge of guilt over but I don't: I lifted some rocks from Grandma's old rock garden that was on the east side of the cabin and put them into our van. There were still plenty and to spare and I wanted a few memorial stones of my own. They later became part of a rock border of one of our flower gardens out front of our home in Chetek. This past fall I rid our yard of most of them and after nearly 15 years I could no longer recall which were "Grandma's rocks" and which were from other places. All but a few now may be found at the landing at the "D" bridge over the Red Cedar River a few miles north of here where one Saturday afternoon last fall I dumped them unceremoniously. I hope Grandma would understand.

Later that summer, Vicki, her sister, Cindie, and I drove over to Milwaukee to attend the State Fair. I took a few shots of them enjoying corn on the cob that since posting them on Facebook they have indicated to me this sort of treasure should have remained buried. Ah, well. I love the one I took of them hamming it up in front of the swine enclosure (pun intended.) Those girls were a lot of fun. After we left the fair we drove over to Whitefish Bay, my hometown and I'm sure I drove them through the old neighborhood. We stopped at Big Bay Park, an old stomping ground of mine from my youth. Situated on the shores of Lake Michigan, we walked the very beach I had tromped hundreds of times when I was a kid. Vicki had her black swimsuit underneath her clothes and quickly stripped down to it. Oh, that black swimsuit...I confess there is a hint of wistfulness as I look at the few images of her out on the breaker. She was ravishing in that suit and, I suspect, she knew its power over me.

The rest of that box contain images from early fall - pictures I took of Madison from a high vantage point when I was a student at the University there and then an image or two from Sugarbush Hill near my grandparents' cottage. There's a great shot of my dad clowning around with my brother on the streets of Eagle River. It had to be Labor Day weekend and we were up north again enjoying the fellowship of the cabin one more time before Grandma and Grandpa closed the place up for the season.

There were other boxes in that carton of slides that I have since converted into jpegs: images of my trip to the Boundary Waters with Soma Christo, my Lutheran youth group, in that Summer of 1980 or the kids that were under my care when I was an employee at Campus For Kids Day Care (1981) or of some of the kids and counselors from Spencer Lake Bible Camp (1982) or of my classmates from my first semester at Christian Life College (1982). Posting them on Facebook has since led to a lot of traffic to my profile page as friends and acquaintances from those days have electronically gathered around these digital photo albums to scroll through images of themselves to be thrilled or embarrassed or curious or perplexed by what they find there.

I think of myself from those days. I struggled with poor self-image, with lust, with doubt over what I should do with my life and with fear of what others thought of me. Everything familiar had changed. I had become a Christian and had left the Lutheran church I had been raised in. I was trying to learn a new vocabulary (e.g., "saved", "redeemed", "blessed", and something called the "tith-ee".) The songs were new. The liturgy was new. The people were new. Most of the time I despised myself for my inability to think purely about women in general and spent a lot of time comparing myself to a number of the guys at our fellowship who seemed so much more spiritual than I was. So to see these pictures after all these years is to be reminded of the way I was. I was young and immature and woefully in need of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. But I was also 18 and just beginning to learn the ropes of this new life in Christ. So that being said these images also provoke me to gratitude for what the Lord has done in me and (thankfully) what he continues to do in me. I'm glad he loved me then awkward and sinful that I felt and that he still loves me some 30 years later. With God's help, I think I'm going to make it.