Preserved memories, in faded glory
My father used to say, “You don’t take care of things.’’ He’d look at my car and shake his head because it was always full of books and toys and empty bags of Goldfish and whatever else my kids were into at the time.
His car was dealership-clean. He’d roll his eyes heavenward and mutter, as if to God, “I don’t know where she came from.’’
He gave me his collection of 35-millimeter slides, hundreds of them, with his neat printing identifying the subject -Dot and Larry, Lorraine and Frank -arranged by date in trays, because he was moving and had no place to keep them.
For years I stored them in an upstairs closet, away from direct sunlight and anything else that might degrade them. But when we demolished the closet, I moved them to the basement.
My father was alive then, and when he found out where his slides went (he asked about them frequently), he announced that he was taking them back. The cellar, he said, was not a fit place for film.
The cellar was finished, heated and not a bad place. But there was no arguing with my father, so I helped him carry the slides out to his car. And that was that - for a while.
Home with his collection, he sorted and gave away. My aunt got all the slides of her family. His friends got slides in which they starred. Almost everyone got something.
I got our family slides back by promising to take better care of them. I stored them in a bedroom, but one spring day the roof leaked and they got drenched. I never told my father. I salvaged what I could, then tucked them away in the cellar again.
Years passed. My father died and I unearthed the slides, held them up to a light bulb and sighed. They were faded, out of focus, a dull orange, and flecked with dust. And I thought, my father was right. I don’t take care of things.
A week ago, I found online an inexpensive slide scanner that converts 35-millimeter photos to digital. It seemed easy to use, so I ordered it. Now the slides are on my computer, still faded, out of focus, dull orange, and flecked with dust.
But a buried treasure, an Aladdin’s lamp.
Pictures that had been only in my head are now on a screen. My mother and father young. My cousins, babies. My grandmothers. Ann Marie and Rosemary and Janet and Diane and Elaine Rooney and Chuck Hibbett.
And my old dog, Buttons.
There’s a picture of Buttons the night my father brought him home. I was in sixth grade and he was a surprise gift - a surprise to my mother, too, a scruffy ball of fur we instantly loved. And there’s a picture of Buttons 10 years later, a bigger, scruffier, ball of fur. Buttons the unexpected star of this slideshow. Like Waldo, in a corner, behind a bush, somewhere in so many photos.
I stare at the front steps where Janet and I used to sit on summer nights. The trellis covered with roses. The skinny Christmas trees my father augmented with cut-off branches and lots of tinsel. The weeping willows that blew down in a hurricane. The patio my father built. The pink dress I loved and the gauzy red and white dress I hated.
My father traded in his Brownie camera for a 35-millimeter the summer of 1957. He took a lot of pictures that first year. Every one is posed and all the smiles are the same. Yet I have a different story for each.
So many photos are missing. The leak in the roof wiped out years. But technology restored years I believed were gone.
The pictures can be doctored, cleaned up, not made perfect, but made better. For now, though, I gaze at them and think how perfect they look just as they are.
Beverly Beckham can be reached at bevbeckham@aol.com. 
