Betwixt and Bewildered: People Are People

For the past couple of days, I've been helping my friend, S, with a little art project. Maybe "little" is the wrong descriptor; let's try "preposterously huge and insanely difficult" instead. She's moving into her very first apartment in a couple of weeks and has been going a little crazy with the decorating ideas. The most recent one was a coffee table. But not just any old store-bought coffee table. This one was going to be custom-made, collapsible, and the tabletop was going to be a black-and-white photo collage of her and her boyfriend, D's, favorite moments. (Okay, I know all of you know who I'm talking about, but just humor me.) My description makes it sound kind of ridiculous, but it actually looked amazingly cool when we were finished with it. Anyway, helping her cut, paste, and place all the photos from their respective childhoods and beyond made me a bit nostalgic for my own past, so I paid a visit to my grandparents' garage.

Why my grandparents' garage, you ask? As it turns out, I don't actually have any baby pictures of myself. Actually, I don't have any pictures of myself before I was about nine years old. Unfortunately for me, neither do my parents. It seems that in the hustle and bustle of post-divorce changes of address, all of the boxes containing my childhood photos were lost, never to be seen again. Sad, but true. Luckily, my grandparents were ardent pack rats and saved every single photo my parents ever sent them. (Not-so-luckily, my parents were less-than-diligent about sending photos after my brothers were born, but I'll take what I can get.) So, today I made my way over to the house to see what I could dig up.

I didn't really know where to start, but after some searching, I found some of the photo albums I was looking for. Of course my brothers had a whole scrapbook, but baby me was conspicuously absent. More searching revealed a couple of "cards and letters" boxes that looked very promising, so I dug into those too. Sadly, no photos, but, elbow-deep in spider webs, I discovered something even more precious: I managed to catch a glimpse of my grandparents as real people.

They both died when I was young. Not super young, mind you, but they passed before I was old enough to consider them as anything other than "my grandparents." Digging through the correspondence they'd sent each other over the years, I realized that they were real people who were really and truly in love with one another. I know it sounds stupid -- of course my grandparents were real people -- but I honestly never even considered the fact that they had lives before they were grandparents. People tend to think of time in terms of their timeline, as in "oh, that happened before I was born" or "yeah, I think I was about 7 when that happened." Even as a student of history, I find it really hard to come to terms with the fact that people were living tens of thousands of years before I even existed. Grappling with the idea that my grandparents were living lives and experiencing things ridiculously similar to my life, 60 years later, really rocked the metaphorical boat. I read through what might possibly have been the very first letter my grandfather ever sent my grandmother: one in which he explained that he had broken off his four-year relationship to a girl he didn't love, a girl his family expected him to marry, and requested permission to take my grandma out on a date. I spent hours reading those letters. I experienced their lives as they got married; their trials and tribulations as my grandpa was drafted into the Navy during the Korean War and as he tried to comprehend the senseless violence that was occurring all around him; and the eagerness and hope that kept him going as he waited for the day when he would be discharged, so he could build his dream house and be with the woman he loved. (It sounds like one of those sappy historical dramas, right?) I even found their wedding photos and the bible that was used during the ceremony, inscribed with the phrase "May you live a long and happy life together." And they did. At least, I think they did. Like I said, I never really knew them as people, but finding all this stuff -- all these memories that had been literally just gathering dust for years -- really makes me wish that I had. You can't change the past though. For now, I'm just thankful for the fact that I have a second chance to get to know them as people and not just as my grandparents.

Also, in case you're wondering if I was successful in my original quest, I was. I did ultimately find a handful of ridiculously adorable photos of me, and since I've been told that a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm including one of my favorites.