Growing Versions

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance. -Yoko Ono

The other day my dad brought this little rig along. It is called a "Paterson Design 101"  slide viewer. I must have seen it before in one of my many forays into their basement, but it kind of took me off guard.  It is so simple to use and yet it has a secret world inside, just waiting for me to pick it up. Along with the slide viewer, he brought along 20 slides of pictures from my time in Hungary almost 20 years ago. For the next hour, I spent time with the Paterson Design 101, peering into the back lit past. Pictures of new (then) friends who I haven't really seen since, houses, markets, the control room of a power station, and the grandparents of people I met. I retreated into a world where somehow I ended up in a parade in a town I cannot remember the name of... ...that had a culture house that kept homesickness at bay.  It illuminated a time in my life, a coming into my adult self. The slide viewer helped me to experience those images in a whol...

Cyril Blakeney died in 1973, 1 1/2 years before I was born and 25 years before his oldest grandchild got an email account. He was a family man, a business owner and a collector of treasures.  His dad died in the Halifax explosion and he worked hard from an early age to help support his mom while she raised three kids.  He was my grandfather and we never got to meet but he often enters my mind.  He lived his whole life in the same city I do.  I have lived in his home. My kids walk around his neighbourhood everyday.  I know people who go to his church.   I know the streets he walked like the back of my hand. I just don't have any memories of him directly. Up until recently, the house that he and my grandmother had raised my mom in from babyhood to university graduate was still in our family and I could get little glimpses of evidence even 36 years later that he had lived there, done the books at the kitchen table, stashed treasures in the basement, ...