The Art of Scanning Photos

I have been scanning pictures. It’s been on my to do list for years. I have boxes of photo albums languishing in the garage, gazing at me forlornly every time I park the car, wanting attention, wanting to be immortalized in the ethereal spaces of the magic box – the computer.

The impetus that prompted me to begin the horrendous process of scanning hundreds – no thousands of pictures – has been to find old snapshots to illustrate my memoir. I have no other pressing tasks to do with the book. The dozens of agent queries I sent out are dead in the water. I have no desire to even look at the manuscript, let alone initiate any more editing.

First, I bought a disc player attachment for my MacBook Pro and downloaded the old childhood family photos that my brother had painstakingly scanned and gifted in CD form to all the family members. That was laborious. It took forever. The disc player kept stalling. Oh, I don’t even want to recall that pain – but I did it.

Next I decided to scan a pristine picture album: my own photo collection from when I first came to Seattle as a teenager in 1966. I began with loading one snapshot at a time onto my geriatric printer/scanner. Each scan took over two minutes – an initial “preview,” and then the actual scan. And then I found an option to scan several photos at a time, and the dear machine actually identifies them as separate photos. Eureka! I became more efficient, pulling the next batch of photos out of the albums as the last ones were loading. Ouch! Hard on the cuticles as my thumbs got shoved into the edges of the plastic slip covers over and over. But I made progress.

Oh no! The scanner jammed. Damn! Unplug the scanner, boot up and hope it works. It does! It chugs along and captures another dozen or so photos. I baby the scanner, petting it and cooing sweet nothings: “You can do it babe. You got this sweetheart!”

As I crop and rotate the pictures in the iPhoto app, lo and behold, I discover the info function! I can edit the time – change it from the current day to that sweet day long ago – and it tells me exactly how many years, days, minutes – and, for crying out loud, seconds – ago that photo was taken. Forty-five years, three days, sixteen hours, five minutes and forty-two seconds? Really? Woo hoo! And not only can I load the date, but I can enter exactly where the shot was taken – it locates using GPS. So I can tell the computer that this photo was taken at the Seattle Community College campus – or St John, Virgin Islands – or even the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee – no kidding!

I have now scanned three albums – up until the time my son was born thirty-six years ago. You can imagine how many albums I have yet to work on. Zot!

“Make sure you have backup,” my daughter says as I happily and proudly tell her what I have achieved. She knows of what she speaks for she lost thousands of photos when her computer crashed three years ago. No problem, I say. I have backup.

However, my backup hard drive is testy. Sometimes when I plug it in to the USB port, it doesn’t read as being plugged in. Good grief! I play cha cha cha, in and out with the plug. I wait a while and try plugging it in again. Ah – I get it to back up – finally – and just to make sure, I open the hard drive and look for my photos. Where the heck are they? Nowhere to be found! I open every part of the hard drive time machine. Nooooo!

I have an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar this afternoon.

St John, Virgin Islands, December 1972

Illness

We’re not broken, just bent . . .

                                    . . . Pink

I’m coming out of a four-week-long tunnel filled with the flu. Yes I suffered the usual symptoms: aches, fevers, malaise, cough, congestion and fatigue, but even more prominent and disturbing was a sense of dullness, ennui, and just not caring about anything.

There was also fear, seeing my granddaughter ill: couch bound, listless, barely responding for hours at a time.

I stopped most activities: no emails, no writing, no bill paying. My life suspended.

I fell into watching TV series: Death in Paradise and Rosemary and Thyme, and I needlepointed, listening to Maisie Dobbs and Inspector Gamache mysteries on tape. I got lost in fantasy for hours on end.

Not even journaling or meditating. Pissed at God.

In the midst of it all came a sense of ending. Was this the end of my life? Was this how people die? Do they lose interest in life, get lost in the pablums of TV shows and novels? Are they are no longer able to come up with one single new, creative idea or activity, and is there no urge to peek out of the quagmire of dullness?

A frisson of fear came as I remembered my mother’s later years, spookily like my own in that she was stuck on her favorite TV shows – General Hospital, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy – and Sidney Sheldon novels. Had I become my mother?

And the self-loathing – I berated myself for not being able to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Why can’t you get out of your funk, get out of your rut, get your ass in gear? Do something, for Christ’s sake!

And then I began to feel better, but the detached behaviors had taken hold and it was hard to reverse the numbness, the darkness. I struggled to climb out of the pit I’d allowed myself to fall into.

I took up journaling again – and meditating. I went to the gym for a ten-minute workout and came home worn out, but mollified – a little. I noticed the spring blossoms. I updated my bank accounts. I cleaned under my kitchen sink – instigated by a liquid soap spill. I felt a frisson of pleasure – barely noticeable. I had to focus on celebrating and being grateful for these tasks in order to pierce the shadowy bubble that obscured my soul.

So now I am close to being back to health. It almost feels like I had a near death experience – it’s like I was giving up on life, giving up on myself, who I am, what I want, what I dream.

For a while I hadn’t dared to dream. Zot! That is sobering.

We’re not broken, just bent

And we can learn to love again . . .

Indeed!

Needlepointing

I recently finished a needlepoint canvas – a Hopi Indian girl that was gifted to me by my friend, Adrienne. Her mother, a needlepointer, had left her a pile of canvases and threads. Adrienne thought the Hopi girl canvas from her mother’s stash would be a great gift for my granddaughter, Ada, and I agreed.

Then, my friend and I discovered The Needlepointer in Everett. What a fabulous store with such helpful and knowledgeable staff. Adrienne helped me choose the threads for the canvas – and it was her idea to use beads – “It’s such a native Indian thing to do.” The tiny wobbly beads were a challenge, requiring an extra slim needle that rendered the thread practically impossible to poke through its microscopic eye. But with advice from the store staff and persistence, I got the hang of it.

I began to needlepoint in my twenties. I learned it from my mother who always had some kind of handwork project going, whether knitting, crocheting, macraméing or needlepointing. I tried the other crafts, but felt most at home with needlepointing – despite my mother’s quip that it was hülye le föl le föl – idiot down up down up – work. It helped that I was fascinated with the intricate gorgeous medieval tapestries that I ogled in the Cluny Museum in Paris. I still have a dream of stitching a complex project like that some day.

I stopped doing any handwork for thirty years while raising my family and living life. Adrienne pulled me back in with her yen to take up where her mother had left off. I unearthed a canvas of poppies I’d begun to work on thirty years ago and finished stitching it as a gift for my daughter, Stephanie.

On my first outing to The Needlepointer I found a beach canvas and completed it in no time. On my most recent trip to the store for additional thread for the Hopi girl canvas, I fell in love with another beach scene – this one in vibrant oranges, purples, aquas and greens. Gorgeous! I had to have it.

I can spend hours stitching, looking like an alien wearing magnifying goggles over my reading glasses. I love stitching with friends. I’ve also gotten into listening to audio books while I work. I’ve “read” Brideshead Revisited narrated by Jeremy Irons – brilliant – and To Kill a Mockingbird with Sissy Spacek – marvelous. I’ve also listened to countless Michael Connelly crime novels, Maisie Dobbs mystery novels, on and on.

After two or three hours at the needle, I see double. The night I finished the Hopi Girl was nail biting as I barely had enough thread to complete the background. But I couldn’t stop with that canvas – I had to begin my vibrant beach scene. I had to keep at it . . . until bleary eyed, I finally gave it a rest at 2 a.m.

Most every day, I can’t wait to get back to the stitching. Can’t wait!

Aloha

Today is the first day in three weeks that my foot gash hasn’t seeped.

It happened in Maui, the day after we arrived – my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

We three ladies strolled along the beach that morning. I flew into the water on the pretext of being eager to sample the inviting ocean, but really, I had to pee.

Whomp! I scissor kicked over a hidden lava rock and sliced the sole of my foot from the tip of my great toe, across the metatarsal pad and into my arch. It’s as if an orange peeler has taken a wedge out of my foot, I thought ruefully, remembering how in the sixties, Joe the Gadget Man from the Nock and Kirby’s hardware store had demonstrated the tool on Aussie television.

Vermillion streamed everywhere. Couldn’t stem the flow. Red streaks covered the outdoor shower like fast flowing lava. Couldn’t rinse the blood off the concrete. I asked my daughter-in-law to do it after she delivered an inch-thick wad of paper napkins. My son arrived, armed with a pack of Band-Aids, enough to slow the stream until, holding onto his arm, I could limp back to the condo – a gorgeous place, seven floors up with a sweeping view of the pools, palm trees, exotic gingers, hibiscus and the stunning ocean beyond.

Superglue liquid bandage – stings like a . . . – stings horribly, Steri-strips, non-stick pads, tape. Foot elevation.

How mean the ocean was to me! What ever happened to my sacred relationship, my connection forged years ago on the Sydney beaches? I tried to meditate. All that came to me was to slow down. Really? I couldn’t do much else, gimpy and needing to keep my foot elevated. Really?

A couple of days later, I braved the pool, delighting in the playtime with my granddaughter and her parents. Enchanting child. Loving, devoted parents. One heck of a lucky grandmother and mother! I had applied a waterproof bandage that got waterlogged, macerating the already messy wound. No worries. I was spending time with my family in paradise, sipping a mai tai by the poolside, listening to the singer crooning Hawaiian standards – nostalgic and hokie, but strangely satisfying and endearing. My granddaughter and I swayed to “Blue Hawaii,” “I Love You More Today than Yesterday,” and “Tiny Bubbles.” It was perfection!

I meditated again – and again. The ocean remained silent. Was it mad at me? What had I done? I’d soiled it with my pee and didn’t ask its permission to enter. Okay ocean. I apologize.

Crimson daybreak on the sixth morning found me by the ocean once more, meditating. Pink tinged surf, the mischievous coming and going of the swells, the perfectly comfortable, just right temperature of the wind’s breath. This time I fell into Mother Ocean’s rhythm and settled. Connect with everything, she said, not just people. I knew exactly what she meant. The tears streamed. I opened my eyes and watched a humpback whale breaching in my direct line of sight. My tears flowed again and my body vibrated with the confirmation. Return to me and stay in touch with me, even when you are away. Yes, and have respect.  

Aloha and mahalo to my son, his wife and my dear granddaughter. Aloha and mahalo to the tropical ocean, my beloved portal to the sacred. With each step I feel a twinge in my sole and my soul remembers.

P52 Week 51 & 52 -- The Beginning and The End

The Project 52 has come to a close. I am proud to have persevered to the end.

I am grateful to have shared this ambitious project with my incredibly talented daughter, Stephanie. Her photographs each week have touched me. They have rattled my creative cage.

I am grateful for the feedback I’ve received from friends and family who have read my posts. Thank you for taking the time to read and to let me know your thoughts. I have learned from your comments. I have grown by sharing in the worldwide community that has spanned the United States, my Aussie youth, and my Hungarian roots. 

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to hone my writing craft. Coming to a blank page every week has been daunting and sobering. I have rather startled myself that I been able to come up with a composition each week.

I am grateful to have learned a huge lesson: I could not have done P52 alone. I had to be accountable to Stephanie. I had to come through for her each and every week. Lord knows I’ve left so many projects undone for want of that reckoning.

I am fortunate to have that kind of support with my writing. Stephanie has kept me honest with the P52 project. My two stalwart writing buddies, Jack and Anne, have kept my nose to the grindstone of my memoir project for the past five years. Thank you! And for over two and a half years, Dave, teacher extraordinaire, mentor and partner, has received my emails tabulating my weekly writing progress. Thank you!

I don’t know how the blog will transform in 2016. Steph and I have bandied about some ideas. For now, I celebrate our achievement. Thank you, dear daughter, for throwing out the challenge. It has been my honor and privilege to embark on, to persevere, and to complete this epic odyssey with you. Two years ago you threw down the gauntlet for me to join you on the grueling climb to Mailbox Peak. Then last year you came up with the idea for us to do the Project 52. I shudder to think what you’ll suggest next . . .