Pics: Part Two

   Going through old photo albums has been an ongoing process lately. I had an initial burst of energy around this when we were headed west to scatter my Dad's ashes. There were pics I wanted to be able to share with people along the way so I took more than a cursory glance at the albums before we left.
   We have been back for awhile now and I have been walking past the pile of stuff, photo albums included, which ended up at our place after my Dad's apartment was emptied out. In an effort to organize and make some sense of all this I have been sorting and paying much more attention to things than I've previously had time to do.


L-R, Aunt Eileen and my Mum in the "Devil's Cauldron" pond

   It has been an enlightening process. I am sad that I never had the opportunity to sit down with my Dad before he died and go through them. Many of the old photos related directly to some of the stories he used to tell me about the olden days and it would have been wonderful to have sat down with him and actually looked at some of the things he'd only been telling me stories about. At the same time, I would have been able to ask him some of my remaining unanswered questions.

   I wrote about this in an earlier blog but one of his favourite stories to tell me was the one about the Banff Springs Hotel and the famous golf course there. He was particularly fond of the fourth hole, the "Devil's Cauldron", as it is known. He would always describe it in great detail, even to his description of the fellow in the boat, the "Maid of the Missed", who patrolled the huge pond in front of the green, returning missed shots to their owners (for a price). I was only able to imagine what this hole looked like though. Then, just recently, after we got back from out west, I happened to be looking through one of his old albums and realized there were pictures of my Dad, Grandad and somebody else playing golf. One of the pics was a far away shot of the Banff Springs hotel and I then was able to figure out that the pics were actually of the Devil's Cauldron! I then was able to find pictures of my mum and my Aunt Eileen wading in the pond in front of the green. My best guess was that these were taken in the mid- to late forties.
   An album of my mum's was kind of a combination photo/scrapbook album and contained many pictures of her  when she was a law clerk for the RCAF during the war. Many of the photos were of her and the other clerks and their friends hanging out. Several of them pre-dated my Dad and were of her and the occasional boyfriend. This, of course, was very enlightening, imagining my Mum with romantic attachments which didn't include, at the time, my Dad!
   What I found in the scrapbook section was even more revealing. I found many poems in my Mum's handwriting, poems about love lost and the War. Hard to say whether they were poems of her own or simply poems she'd found somewhere and wanted to remember. What I do know is that I have always had a fascination with poetry and I'm thinking it might have been hereditary...
   Probably the most interesting thing I found in the scrapbook section was a an RCAF itinerary she'd been given with very precise instructions as to accompanying the remains of a compatriot by train from Winnipeg to Kelowna, B.C. There were instructions as to assisting the family with the death of their loved one, funeral home arrangements and the like.
   I was totally unaware that my mum had done anything like this but not surprised. When I did the math, however, I realized that this had been a responsibility she'd been given when she was about twenty! I couldn't even imagine the weight of this kind of a task when I was twenty or even the age I am now. I do know, though, that those were war years and things simply were different, you did what you had to do and this was all part of the battle. Finding this bit of documentation meant so much to me.


Andy Bathgate and family members

   One of my mum's best friends back in the forties and fifties was a girl named Verah Bathgate. They had been in the RCAF together and the album was full of pictures of the two of them. One of the pictures included amongst these was a picture of Verah's brother, Andy, their mum and, I think, a couple of Andy's nieces. What really caught my attention was that Andy was one of the top NHL players of his day and always one of my favourites. Until yesterday, I didn't even know this picture existed.
   I found pictures of my mum and her family vacationing in the mountains, in front of the Chateau Lake Louise and, of course, the prerequisite pic in front of Lake Louise itself. These were places Doralyn and I had just returned from and it was poignant knowing that we had just been only paces away from paths my relatives had trod almost seventy years ago.

Aunt Eileen at Banff Springs Hotel

   Flipping through old photo albums is like watching through a time machine. You see young people growing older as each page turns. I saw pictures of my mum as a toddler, as a teenager, a nurse, a new mother, a sparkling wife, a loved neighbour. I also saw a picture of her only about a month before she passed.
   I watched my Dad go through all the different phases of his life as well. I saw him as a very young boy, with his brother and sister and Mum and Dad, on beaches and in boats, as a sailor in the Navy, as a championship-winning football player, as the insurance man, as a widower and then again as a brand-new husband. I saw him transform into a father, a grandfather and then a great-grandfather.


My sister, Jayne, and I. You're welcome, Jayne!

   Speaking of my Dad as a new husband, there were pictures of Jean, my step-mum, when I first met her. From there, many pictures of a happy couple with friends and relatives over the years, enjoying their years together. It was possible to follow them from place to place as they moved around Canada. And they aged right before your eyes, right into grey hair and wheelchairs. And then my Dad as a widower again.
   Via saved school pictures, I watched many of my cousins grow up.
   There had been a book of family pictures which had always had a prominent position on Dad and Jean's coffee table. I found myself flipping through this and found pictures taken of myself and my ex-wife, Lori, the two of us sitting on the couch in Dad's living room. I turned a couple more pages and all of the sudden there's pictures of me and Doralyn, sitting on the same couch. And, bizarrely, I am wearing the same shirt!
   The difficulty in all this, though, is that as much as these people all seem so alive and vibrant many of them are no longer with us. I remember seeing one picture of Dad and Jean and a handful of the neighbours from Oakridge and, out of the seven or eight people pictured, only one was still alive. It is a bittersweet process, to be sure.

Dad and Jean, happy together.

   I am missing some pictures. There are pictures I am clearly able to recollect having seen as a kid that are nowhere to be found. It would be wonderful to see the pictures from when my Mum and Dad honeymooned with Marg and Ralph Green but I just can't find them. I had no chance to really talk to Dad about them, they just didn't seem important at the time. Hopefully they are floating around somewhere in one of his kids' storage cupboards or something like that and will pop up again.
   There is something wonderful about the digital picture age--it is how all of these images have appeared on these screens. The instantaneous ability to take a picture and, literally in the next three seconds, have it posted on the internet is pretty heady stuff. At the same time, you are not able to hold these pictures in your hand, you're not able to flip through pages of them, and you are not able to feel the ghosts of all who perhaps held the camera or, themselves, were the subject of the picture.