LAUREL COUNTY, Ky. — In rummaging through old photographs with my mother one evening, nostalgia settled in like an old cat on a windowsill.  We carefully handled 50 years worth of flimsy glossed-over paper and gazed longingly into them like an open window.

The first photo my mother held up into the dim basement light was my father walking down the lawn from his 1969 snow-white Corvette with a glass bottle of Pepsi in hand.  I suppose it was something about his all-American, Detroit attitude and 1970s debonair flair that swooned her at 20-years-old.  Or perhaps it was because he was a self-supporter with ambition, something many men lack today.

She passed the photo over to me and picked up another. It was of her mother, my grandmother, laying peacefully on a couch in the middle of nap.  The photo of Mary Lou — what a lovely name she had — immediately gave me a sad disposition because it easily emulated the way she softly slept in her coffin when I was too small to understand life and death.  I quickly laid the photo down and reverted back to the way I like to remember her, when she would sit my sister and I down into her kitchen chairs to eat warm corn dogs from the oven.

We traveled from north to south as the next photo portrayed my grandmother gracefully laying upon her mother’s bed deep in eastern Kentucky.  My great-grandmother was sick at the time, and most of the family knew how sick because the photos that proceeded were of the immediate family gathering at her home in the Blair Branch holler.  Meanwhile, there I sit at 2-years-old, entertaining the older folks with my babyish antics.

Now, that’s what everyone loves — photographs of their prior “self” when thoughts were innocently abstract and crayons were candy.  At least they were for me, and so I demanded a further search of the times when I was a drool factory.  I found one of me as a little Indian for Halloween, laying sweetly in a hammock unattended and playing with about 10 knotted balloons on a couch with my baby doll.  My favorite one of all was of my sister and I in a soft-pink tub with the same haircut back-to-back probably pretending to be little mermaids in perfect symmetry.

There’s a great deal to learn about life and death through photographs.  There’s also much to learn about your heritage.  If there were no photographs, I would have never known that my Polish great grandfather “Jaju” held me as a newborn, that I napped just like my grandmother, that my sister and I actually got along, or that my father thought he was the next long-haired rock star, even though the real one lived a few doors down — He’s now known as the famous Jack White.

Next time you’re at home thinking there’s absolutely nothing to do in the unbearable summertime heat, ask your parents or grandparents to go through a lifetime of happiness, heart breaks and bad hairdos with you.  It’s better than daytime television and the movies, that I can promise you.



mmccrarey@sentinel-echo.com