Mom and Paul
Sometimes I like to rummage through old photographs and look back. Pictures are so important. They are windows to the past. As I found out sometime ago, memories are very slippery, unreliable things, prone to flights of fancy.
I remember going back to Akron some twenty years after graduating from high school. I went to my old neighborhood with fond memories of how we used to play football all day in the neighbor’s yard. It was, in my memory, huge! Nearly the length of a regulation football field, some 300 ft long, or 100 yards! In reality, the lot was probably more like 100 feet long, or 33 yards, with 20 feet occupied by the house! We had a lot less room to play than I thought!
I knew that we lived in a small house, but not this small! 
Here is the actual description for the house that I grew up in. I took it from the tax records. My brother now lives in and owns this house:
DESCRIPTION: COLONIAL FRAME 2 STORY WITH 432 SQ FT GROUND FLOOR LIVING AREA AND 864 TOTAL SQ FT LIVING AREA, BUILT ABOUT 1918. IT HAS 5 TOTAL ROOMS WITH 2 BEDROOMS, 1 FULL BATHROOM, A FULL BASEMENT, HEATING IS CENTRAL AND THE OVERALL CONDITION IS FAIR.
It’s funny, I lived in it all of my life and it never felt small. Now, there are 3 of us and we live in a 2,600 sf house. We consume so much! Oh well. When I go back to Ohio on July 13th, for my aunt’s 80th birthday, I’ll have to stop by the old house and take a picture of it and the neighborhood. I don’t have any.
In the above picture, I was about 10, my mother was 47 at that time. That was about 35 years ago. Sometime around 1972. I was probably in 5th grade. I remember that one of favorite pastimes was to watch the birds and to feed my ‘pet’ squirrel in the backyard. This squirrel used to come down this huge maple tree that we had and take peanuts from my hand. I was disappointed to find that the maple tree had been cut down long ago. It provided great shade and a nice place to play, although it also provided a heck of a lot of work in the fall! I had to rake the leaves, but the reward for the big pile of leaves was that I and all of my friends got to jump in the pile!
I also had a small garden in the backyard. I used to take beans, corn, and whatever type of seed that I could get my hands on and plant them outside. I had a kind of a random harvest of things that the bugs or birds didn’t get, but life was simple and fun.
I was never the sports kind of guy, but was more into reading, learning, experimenting, and observing; however, as my third grade teacher said, I was ‘gregarious’. I used to get in trouble for talking in class. Hmmm, I guess that Tony gets it honestly. That’s the only problem that we usually hear about: “He is very social”. Well, mom, I had one just like me!
Butch and Paul
As long as I can remember, I’ve always had a dog. Here I am with Butch. He was a part Siberian Husky and part Norwegian Elkhound. I had him for long time! Probably from the time that I was 8 or 9 until I left home at 22. It hurt to leave him, but he was getting old. He was a great dog and wonderful companion. He stayed outside, but I used to go to the backyard to play with him a lot. Notice that in the picture, I have no shoes on. It’s my normal mode of operation. I don’t do shoes unless the rules require it. I think that in the summer time, I went for the entire summer without shoes. I’m a country boy at heart.
Of course, back in those days, I didn’t own a camera, except a Polaroid. Even then, that wasn’t mine, it belonged to my father, but I used it whenever he would let me. The film was pretty expensive, about $1.00 per shot, which was quite a bit back then, so I didn’t get to use it a lot. These were copies of Polaroid pictures that I made around 1982, or so. I used Kodak Tech Pan 25 to copy them and make negatives, which I just found today.
I’m happy that these have made along in my journey over the 25 years, across 3 states (Ohio, Texas, North Carolina), and thousands of miles. These pictures are windows to a past that had an important part in forming who I am today and I am happy that I have the opportunity to share them with you.
More nostalgia tomorrow.
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