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Autumn Greens

I did more scanning this evening...

This photo takes my breath away (overlooking the Hudson River, from Palisades - September 14, 1957).

I ♥ ❤ ❥ ❣ ❦ ❧ these photos!

I'm deep into this photo archive project. Whenever I have a spare evening, I can't help myself... I have to bring out some more slides! I hit that "scan" button and I can't wait to find out what new revelation is around the corner!

All you people out there... you have parents... if you were lucky, eventually, they got old and cliche-ridden...

But, wait!!! Guess what?!? At one time, those crazy kids were young trend-setters, eager to impress themselves upon the landscape!

And these are the people I discover every time I go to the scanner...

My mother, the pinup -- a single girl in 1957 on Long Island, before the marriage, before the five children...

My father, her suitor, a veritable hipster, at Nashville's Parthenon in a sweater his brother gave him...

And I can't tell you how much I love, love, love this photo. On the slide I scanned, my mother wrote that these were the "most important men in [her] life." My father, her brother, and her father, in 1957. What absolutely incredible men. My grandfather is gone now, but the other two still make my heart race whenever I hear their voices...

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Early 1957

I've been doing a bit more scanning this week. Here's a sample of the output...

My grandparents, in the church my grandfather was building in Lawrenceburg, TN, Feb. 1957

My uncle and mother with the new chevy, Feb. 1957

Bronx Zoo, Easter, 1957 (yes, that's Little Billy and Judie!)

My aunt, uncle and mother at Harvard University, June 22, 1957

1956, Lawrenceburg, TN

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming...

... for this photo of my mother in Oslo just a few years ago. She always appreciated the fact that Norwegians throw a big party every year for her birthday and she got to visit the country several times over the years, as part of her many travel adventures.

Happy Train Day!

I was going to post about trains tomorrow, on Mother's Day, because my mother was one of the biggest fans of trains. She journeyed across America and back numerous times on the train, enjoyed the gorgeous ride across Canada, rode the Orient Express, and had adventures on many other trains in Europe, Asia, North America and Austraila.

So, I naturally thought of my mother when I came upon this post by Kvatch about how we need to refocus on rail here in the US. It's an argument people have been making for years (though much to my mother's frustration, it's mostly fallen on deaf ears as Americans have continued their long-term romance with automobiles), but I think we might finally be at a pivot point when it comes to trains.

The days following the attack on the World Trade Center demonstrated how vulnerable we are when our airlines can't fly. And recent chaos at our airports has shown that it doesn't take a major disaster to effectively shut down air travel. We not only need a good backup transportation option for when air travel is disrupted, but we also need to seriously consider the environmental impact of flying and consider alternatives whenever possible. Trains fill both these needs.

I recently attended an information session about a Maglev train route that might eventually run from Savannah, Georgia to Chicago, Illinois (which would stop in Chattanooga), and the benefits are numerous. Maglev trains are quiet, efficient, very clean, and they can carry freight -- and especially when you factor in the typical delays involved in flying (like baggage check, endless waits at security checkpoints and required early arrivals), they can be just as fast as flights on many popular commuter routes. Americans are way behind Asia and Europe in developing high-speed train technology and routes, but now that gas prices have us looking for alternatives to riding all alone in gas-guzzling SUVs, we might see some progress toward the planning and implementing of some high-speed train routes.

As I said, I was planning on posting about all this tomorrow, but via mindful mission, I just discovered that today is National Train Day. Why May 10th? Because "on May 10, 1869, in Promontory Summit, Utah, the 'golden spike' was driven into the final tie that joined 1,776 miles of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railways, ceremonially creating the nation's first transcontinental railroad."

So, happy train day, kids! Get your Choo-Choo on! :-D

Great Women

Happy Mother's Day! I've come up with a little holiday treat this year, featuring a few of my favorite vintage photos, which highlight some extraordinary women -- mothers I miss very much, though they all still inhabit my daily life; they are part of my very being, in fact. These are also really neat photos. The first two are probably close to 40 years old and the last likely dates back 25 years or more.

This first one is of my parents. My father's glasses and sideburns date the picture more than anything else. I suspect it was a candid shot, taken by someone who was just snapping pictures, but still I think both the composition and depth of field are well done. The blues in this image -- from my mother's eyes, to my father's shirt, and into the background -- dazzle me. This is a typical moment, with my mother open to all that surrounds her, while my father, no matter what, always found her to be the most fascinating thing in the room. (Believe it or not, my father hasn't changed much since this photo was taken. He has a bit of gray, but that's about the only difference. He wore the same tux to my wedding that he wore to his own and I'm sure it still fits him today.)

This next photo always makes me laugh. It captures a brief and unique point in fashion history, when some very proper women not only wore these dresses out in public, but then went so far as to pose for a picture together in them! The woman on our right is my maternal grandmother, sharing a moment with her sisters. These women all went on to live well into their 90s, and were very accomplished -- especially for females of their generation, who typically stayed home to raise families and then struggled to entertain themselves once their kids were grown. They all graduated from college, and at times bucked the trend by having jobs. In a small town near Memphis, Tennessee, my grandmother was the first white teacher to work in an all-black school in the early 60s. She had a framed classroom photo of her with her students that she proudly displayed for decades after.

This last photo was taken probably ten or fifteen years after the first two, by my then-teenage cousin, who had recently gotten his first SLR camera. The subject is my paternal grandmother, holding her own baby picture, which was probably taken circa 1903. This grandmother was also a working woman. Her career included an era during my childhood when she sold tickets at the local (one-screen!) movie theater. I was so proud to be her granddaughter because she was lucky enough to work in that magical glassed-in booth, where everyone who went to the movies got to talk with her. It was like she was sitting on a throne, and all the people in town were standing in line just to see her (nevermind that they got a movie in the bargain as well)!

Friday Creature

When I was a kid, I remember my mother listening to records of bird calls and she attended ornithology programs over at Cornell a few times. She was a serious birder, so you'd never catch her telling us kids to "look at the birdie" -- she was specific! It was "look at the blue jay" or "wow! there's a bobolink!" But for some reason, the bird name I remember most from my childhood is the rufous-sided towhee. I recently discovered, though, that there is no rufous-sided towhee anymore. The species was divided into two -- the spotted towhee and the eastern towhee. I don't think either name is nearly as cool as their former identity, though, so for me this Eastern Towhee is still and always will be rufous-sided.

Here're more Friday Creatures! Have a wonderful weekend -- may it be at once restful, relaxing, reflective and restorative.