I'm feeling very nostalgic today, our 42nd wedding
anniversary. But melancholy also
intrudes because as time permits (the irony of that phrase weighs on me) I've
been going through the thousands and thousands of photographs I scanned,
leaving behind the world of silver halide prints for digital and more manageable
copies. Although a smidgeon of the way through reviewing the scans, my life is
literally passing before my eyes and I have mixed emotions, some opportunities
perhaps lost, but others seized.
In retrospect, though, my childhood, education, first
marriage, even my career, is dwarfed by my forty two years married to Ann. Today, relationships, and even more so jobs,
seem to be kaleidoscopic, frenetic, relatively short-lived. I've lived with a good woman for nearly half
a century now and had two jobs in my lifetime of working. But when did pulsating youth become, well,
"old age?" I use this
expression somewhat disingenuously, in deference to when I was younger and the thought
of turning 70 meant being really old. Nonetheless, I still feel like I did
decades ago, at least mentally.
And how does one fathom 42 plus years of living with one
person? Prosaic as it may be, the words trust,
humor, patience, and friendship immediately spring to mind. And, so, to
celebrate our anniversary, here are a few of those scanned photographs from
over the decades, admittedly an idiosyncratic selection, ones that amuse me for
the moment, not necessarily the best photographs (I can hear Ann saying
"Why did you use that photograph!!??). And they are mostly scanned photos, with the
drawbacks of that process.
PS Blogger (Google) has changed its blogging interface. It's awful, and the ability to handle photographs is even worse than before. Another learning curve, sigh.
