Joie de vivre

I just spent an hour looking through old pictures grandma gave us. Most of them are from when my dad was young; some from much farther back. Two dime photographs of my great-great grandparents, tiny photos framed in faded ivory cardboard, and now residing in one of my silver frames. There was also a letter my great-grandfather wrote to his father in 1932, on the occasion on his 95th birthday. "All of us wish very much we could be with you to help you celebrate your 95th brithday," he wrote. "But the distance is too great. If it were not so far we would send you a few strawberries to eat with sugar and cream on that day."

Later he wrote, "It always seems to me that the evening of life to one who has walked with God thru all the years, as you have, must be the most glorious and joyous of all the years. To see the approaching sunset of our life, to see the shadows darkening and earth receding and the glories of the other world dawning, this, methinks, must be the crowning experience of supreme joy and happiness to the weary pilgrim as he steps from land into glory."

Looking at these old pictures has made me feel sad. All these people, frozen forever in faded sepia tones...my dad as a baby in the middle of taking one of his first hesitant steps; youngsters playing a game; my grandma running after her child who was fleeing the camera...stuck in a moment of time with no way for me to go to them. I would like to be able to step into these pictures and know these people back in that time when they were young and well and happy. My grandmother, when she was a beautiful young mother with laughing eyes. Not the old woman who lives next door and is crotchety and mean and repeats the same stories over and over.

It's especially poignant to see the pictures of my grandpa. In these pictures I see traces of him now, but only traces. And how few they are. There's so little left of the man that was in the person I see daily. The bent back and crippled legs and failing memory...and most the streak of perverse meanness. I feel sure that the man smiling in the pictures would never have done the petty, hurtful things the man I know does. I feel sad that he's been reduced to this. And I'm almost...yes, almost angry that I never knew the father of my father when he was younger.

Perhaps...perhaps it's not good to live in the past.