Things I Wonder About

 

This picture was taken in the summer of 1968. I would have been 14 years old at the time. I'm the guy standing off to the left side of the photograph. Going to the right- away from me is my Grandpa John, my Mom Anna, my Grandma Harriet, my younger brother David, my older brother Jay and my Mom's brother my Uncle Johnny. We are standing at the entrance to the Wolf Covered Bridge in Knox County, Illinois. Many years later the bridge was burned by vandals. It was later rebuilt as a wooden covered bridge in the image of the original shown here. I have no use for reproduction history. The original is gone and with it the craftsmanship and labor of the original builders. It is like a copy of the Mona Lisa. Nice painting but it does not have the significance or value of the original.

I have been scanning hundreds of photographs over the course of the past few weeks. It is my attempt to get my family's history straight in my head. My wife says that no one but me will care about what I am doing. That our children will not care about relatives they never knew. She may be right. It doesn't matter. I care about those people and they will all live in my head for as long as I am here. Shadows of a past I cannot fully know and an echo of lives that have impacted mine in ways I cannot understand or fully appreciate. I look at them to learn about them. Moments of time caught on film that may give me a hint of what they thought and felt. Letters they left behind, or journals, that give me a clues about their thoughts, hopes, feelings, life experiences.

I keep coming back to this picture. It was here, looking at this image 45 years after it was taken that I realized something about myself. You can see by the length of time that has passed that I am a slow learner. It was something I had seen in many other pictures but noticed when I saw this one. The family is grouped together. I am off a bit to the side. In the picture but not a part of the group. Standing away and apart from my brothers. When I look at pictures this is consistently the case. My brothers now farm together. They attended and graduated from the University of Illinois. They were members of the same fraternity. I graduated from Western Illinois University and was as they often stated a G.D.I. (God Damned Independent). It seems that has been the consistent feature in my life. A bit off to the side, apart from the group, looking for my place to fit in. Now I live in BFE, near the end of a dead end road. My wife and our dogs as my companions. I spent my working career learning the nature of human cruelty and knowing the evil that men can do. I am satisfied with a life apart from the hustle and confusion of the world. I watch and see how the majority of people treat each other and happily remain apart from it and them.