Thursday, December 14, 2000

 

1:04 a.m. Ah, a day without politics! No (hardly any) TV; no radio, no email, no discussions, no editorials, no thinking about it. Pretty much no thinking. We, as a nation, do just fine no matter who sleeps at the top of the conning tower, right?

A word about the photo, at the left. (Of course it's on the left.) I was going through my shoebox 'o memories, looking for some of those universal scenes of the holidays -- children and presents and tinsel and ornaments -- and I came upon a few rapidly disintegrating Polaroids such as this one.

This scene is fast fading and I wanted to capture it to digital, unsharp-mask it a few times because that seemed to be the right thing to do to it, and save what I can of it before it disappears entirely.

My memory of this scene, this Christmas party, is much more faded than the photo, and I've tried to unsharp-mask it as well, but alas. There are only a few things I do remember from this wintry Pennsylvania evening, circa 1973.

First of all, an aside. The people in this photo are all in their twenties, I believe, and there's a whole lot of plaid in the picture. In addition, there is polyester and lots of it, hiding between the pixels. Notice that the party folk are drinking from actual silver goblets. Ahem.

People acted more formal back then, at least until the punch kicked in.

I pretty much don't know the names of most of the people in the photo, except the girl-woman in the middle of the picture, my best friend Joan. She's pretending to be very prim and proper and in fact, in just a few more years she will enter law school and a few more years after that, become a lobbyist and a few more years after that, come here for a visit.

In the photo you can see a few pieces of wooden furniture, right? That little footstool that's being used as a table, the chair Joan is sitting on, and the edge of the rocking chair in the lower right? Every single one of those things was an antique of shaky tendencies and every single one of them had an arm or a leg fall off in the next few years.

As is my tendency, I tried to hide those facts as long as I could. Elmer's glue is not very dependable, I can assure you, and once a leg falls off a piece of furniture at the wrong time, you can never really trust it again.

I'm sure I gave a few more parties with the patched and disreputable chairs and stools, and then eventually we sold that house and moved away. I finally went to college and tried to make something of myself, my ex-husband got custody of the friends without names and the chairs were eventually sold at auction.

You can't tell from the photo, but we were all living under the rule of the Republicans that year. There was some sort of economic crisis centered on oil, as usual, and Nixon had decreed that loyal and patriotic Americans would not illuminate their houses with Christmas lights.

I'm not making this up -- there were no Christmas lights twinkling outside, up and down the street, and we were told to turn the thermostats back to 67 degrees. Most obeyed, grudgingly. Can you imagine? That was the real root cause of his downfall, I believe.

Those were the days and that was our president: short, dark, cold, and brutish.