projecting memories

 

My dad would lift me under the armpits, hoist me above his head so I could scramble onto the canal platform high above the deck of our boat. Then the same for my older brother. We’d find the gigantic wooden lever and push like vikings aboard a rowing ship, both of us, until it gave way to open the gates.

We’d watch as water burst through in streams, pressing against the expanding crack, filling the throughway. Mom and dad’s smiling faces rose above the wall and past our feet as the boat emerged from the crevice and we’d climb on board again. We meandered through northern England and Scotland this way, Easter break explorers.

Gliding under arched stone bridges hundreds of years old, so low we had to press ourselves to the deck to clear the underside of mossy rock. Along waterways lined with tall grasses and walking paths, generations of feet pressing the earth into a smooth, winding line for docking and towing and the stretching of legs. It was a rosy-cheeked adventure within an adventure, frosty mornings spent wrapped in fishermens’ knits and puffy jackets. British camping, it was, pastoral and gentle.

For a four-year-old with a mop, swabbing the decks is as close to heaven as you can get—second only, perhaps, to single-handedly operating a canal.

I say I’ll never forget that year we lived on a busy street in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Not cohesive remembering, but … well, like snapshots. But how much of that is me, and how much has been imprinted on my brain in the dark with a projection screen?

I adore slides. My mom and dad took thousands of of them, kept to this day in stacks of catalogued metal boxes at their house. Australia 1969. July-August 1979. Bedford 1987-88. Every few months we'd beg them to fill the Kodak carousel, unroll the soft, white screen, take us through another episode of our collective history.

Digital photography is all about blogs, flickr, unlimited gluttony. In a good way, but still—compared to the economy necessitated by film, does the digital medium dilute photography's magic with sheer volume? Can files on a laptop ever immerse our kids in vividness, saturate them with memory in the gloriously tactile way of slides and albums?

There’s nothing like a loaded carousel to tranform photographs into an occasion. For me, a pile of sharpie-marked CDs simply cannot compete.

What do you do to make the most of your family photography in the digital age? How will you keep your own adventures alive the way our parents used to, with dinner on fold-up TV tables in the cosy, flickering dark?

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The low-res scan of this slide (and of those on flickr) doesn't whatsoever do it justice. Apologies. All the photos are courtesy of my mom, who tells me she took them with an SLR in her hands for the first time. The drippy nose is courtesy of yours truly.