Three Boxes of Stories (originally posted July 5, 2010)

by Joan

This past weekend, I spent three days with family I haven't seen in years. We watched a slideshow of scanned photos, chatted about family trees and plucked our matriarch's memory for the family scoop. I haven't had time to reflect and write any of it down, so I found a previous post about my continued fascination with our ancestors.

Last week we spent a week in Maryland with my family. One of the highlights of the week was a whirlwind Sunday where we hosted a family brunch and then dinner for friends we don’t see often enough.

For the morning shift, I dug out three boxes of old family photographs. As we munched on bagels, quiche, and Costco granola (we swear it’s laced with crack), I sat next to one of my cousins, whose mind holds three generations of our family tree. With a pencil I jotted the names of great grandparents, aunts and uncles on the back of thick sepia photos, some so old the corners had disintegrated. Many remained unmarked as we debated to which side of the family the stern-faced, bustled ladies belonged.


Maybe one of the men is the artist of the Falmouth sailboat watercolor hanging above my desk and between the pages of The Cemetery Garden. Maybe the guy with the beard is Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Actually, he’s my paternal great-grandfather Zachary Levinson!)

In some faces we saw the shape of my face and eyes. In others we saw three generations of full lips and wavy hair. We’re fairly sure a few pictures were shot in Russia, before our relatives journeyed to Ellis Island. Others were taken in Brooklyn studios. Still others captured their daily life: three familiar faces posing proprietarily in front of a grocery/delicatessen, others in a confectionery, a young married couple standing tenuously side-by-side, my father (as a child) demurely atop a horse.

How will we ever identify those faces shamefully abandoned in the past, like elementary school friends who once pricked fingers and blended blood? Will our great-grandchildren forget us in the same way?

It got me thinking about the layers of our lives, how our ancestors’ actions and decisions affected not only our looks, but where and who we are now. Had they stayed in Russia, they might have lived in an isolated frozen community or been arrested and sent to Siberia. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Maybe I’d work in a government job and walk to work in knee-high boots and a parka. I wish my ancestors had written some of it down, like Kim’s great-grandmother. I have bags of WWII letters from my father, but nothing from the previous generation.

Is that why we write? So years from now, a descendant will find our words and understand us a little more clearly? When we write, we capture a mood or a setting in much the same way a photograph does. With just the right shading and lightening, cropping the boring parts. Posing our characters on a backdrop of plot.

Seeing these pictures also got my creative mind lassoing ideas for a future novel. Like Julie, I need to finish my WIP first, but I’m already excited about where these pictures will lead me. I’ve got about 500 more treasures to scan and, with that, a lifetime of stories to tell.

What about you? Have you found crumbling family photos? Do you know who they are?

Grandpa Richmond

by Joan

We called him Grandpa Richmond. Though we saw my maternal grandfather only once a year, our anxiety over the visit began weeks earlier. We’d plead futilely with our mother to please, pretty please, skip this year. Even though he’d given her up in divorce when she was five, even though he kept her brother in Richmond, my mother never gave up on him.

My mother and grandfather

On a Sunday, my younger sister and I would pass the long two hours on Route 95 I-spying blue cars and giving the universal horn-tugging signal to truck drivers. No trip was complete without a stop for stacked, syrupy goodness at Aunt Sarah’s Pancake House. We dawdled over our plates as long as possible, before our sulky return to the car.  

In Richmond, we would park in front of the row house on Floyd Street and creep up wide porch stairs. My grandfather’s second wife, a wafery blonde with sallow skin, a sourpuss smile and missing finger, would open the screen door and motion us inside.

At the end of a long dark hallway, Grandpa Richmond waited in his wheelchair, one leg dangling in front of him, one trouser leg tied up to his knee. We were told to kiss his white-whiskered cheek as he closed his toothless mouth and raised his face toward us. After a hello Zisela from his rusty voice, we were dismissed to the front room where we scooched far into the sofa. Hello Papa, my mother would say.

Now I scold my eleven-year-old self for not embracing him on the last day I’d ever see him. For not asking him questions about the old country, about Richmond, about  his part in the Great War, his grocery store, bootlegging whiskey. He sacrificed a country, a leg, a daughter to scratch out a better life while I cowered in the corner.

For those of you who asked questions, who have journals and hand-me-down memories, I envy you. I don’t know his story, or hers, for that matter. But I will make it up.

Three Boxes of Stories

by Joan

Last week we spent a week in Maryland with my family. One of the highlights of the week was a whirlwind Sunday where we hosted a family brunch and then dinner for friends we don’t see often enough.

For the morning shift, I dug out three boxes of old family photographs. As we munched on bagels, quiche, and Costco granola (we swear it’s laced with crack), I sat next to one of my cousins, whose mind holds three generations of our family tree. With a pencil I jotted the names of great grandparents, aunts and uncles on the back of thick sepia photos, some so old the corners had disintegrated. Many remained unmarked as we debated to which side of the family the stern-faced, bustled ladies belonged.


Maybe one of the men is the artist of the Falmouth sailboat watercolor hanging above my desk and between the pages of the CEMETERY GARDEN. Maybe the guy with the beard is Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Actually, he’s my paternal great-grandfather Zachary Levinson!)

In some faces we saw the shape of my face and eyes. In others we saw three generations of full lips and wavy hair. We’re fairly sure a few pictures were shot in Russia, before our relatives journeyed to Ellis Island. Others were taken in Brooklyn studios. Still others captured their daily life: three familiar faces posing proprietarily in front of a grocery/delicatessen, others in a confectionery, a young married couple standing tenuously side-by-side, my father (as a child) demurely atop a horse.

How will we ever identify those faces shamefully abandoned in the past, like elementary school friends who once pricked fingers and blended blood? Will our great-grandchildren forget us in the same way?

It got me thinking about the layers of our lives, how our ancestors’ actions and decisions affected not only our looks, but where and who we are now. Had they stayed in Russia, they might have lived in an isolated frozen community or been arrested and sent to Siberia. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Maybe I’d work in a government job and walk to work in knee-high boots and a parka. I wish my ancestors had written some of it down, like Kim’s great-grandmother. I have bags of WWII letters from my father, but nothing from the previous generation.

Is that why we write? So years from now, a descendant will find our words and understand us a little more clearly? When we write, we capture a mood or a setting in much the same way a photograph does. With just the right shading and lightening, cropping the boring parts. Posing our characters on a backdrop of plot.

Seeing these pictures also got my creative mind lassoing ideas for a future novel. Like Julie, I need to finish my WIP first, but I’m already excited about where these pictures will lead me. I’ve got about 500 more treasures to scan and, with that, a lifetime of stories to tell.

What about you? Have you found crumbling family photos? Do you know who they are?