Taking stock of old photograph albums this evening, just to know what’s what, so as to begin thinking about what to do with what, I had occasion to look at a lot of very old pictures of me, of Kathleen, of our families, and even of people who I only heard about as a child. Aunt Lala, for instance. She was a connection of my maternal grandfather’s family in St Paul, but I’m not sure that she was actually related to anyone. Imagine being called “Lala”! And the way my mother would say her name told me that, well, it meant pretty much what you’d think it would today.

Kitty Lilly at ten, looking gorgeous already (what a colleen she was!) in a swimsuit, posed demurely but not primly on a dock at White Bear Lake. Kitty babysat for us while she attended Manhattanville College, in the late Fifties. I could swear that she took us to see Vertigo and Teahouse of the August Moon — fascinatingly inappropriate movie choices. She probably didn’t; but she was so cool that it’s no wonder that I pin the adventures on her. One of my favorite memories is of her correcting me in the kitchen during one of my parents parties. She was all dressed up, while I was malingering in my pyjamas and bathrobe — ” malingering” being a fine word, I think, for a child’s opportunistically contriving to stay up way past bed time. Always ready to tell anyone who asked what it was that I wanted — for Christmas, for my birthday, or just in general — I angled passionately for my latest heart’s desire, a set of “resonance chessmen.” Eventually, Kitty figured out the spoonerism and clued me in. The funniest part is that, at least as I remember them, the Renaissance chessmen were in fact quite lugubriously gothic, elongated like the kings at Chartres. I never got the chessmen, which is a great relief to my conscience, as I never played chess with enough interest to deserve a special set of any kind. After Manhattanville, Kitty went back to Lincoln, married, and had a family. I exchange Christmas cards with her widower, whom I may have met once, a long time ago. I haven’t met either of Kitty’s daughters.

Then there’s an album that will be very easy to knock down into digital shape. It’s a collection of smallish Polaroids of a dinner party for 65 people that my parents gave, in the spring of 1972, to introduce my first wife (then my fiancée) and her mother to their friends. Tables for eight or ten were strewn about the house; I dined at the one in my old bedroom. Well, “old” bedroom. I’d moved out of it about a year earlier, and into it only three years before that. There was a Raj aspect to our immense Tanglewood home: my father would not have been able to afford anything like such square footage in the Westchester that we’d left behind in 1968. At the party, you won’t be surprised to learn, our table was the most riotous. One of the most high-spirited company wives was easily goaded by a rather interesting member of the “St Michael’s Mafia” into smoking a great big cigar, and how we all ended up with our clothes on, I’ll never know.

On my honeymoon with Kathleen, nine years later, we went up to New Hampshire and stayed at a place called the Woodbound Inn. Never has there been such a peak week for sugar-maple reds; the snapshots that I took look hand-colored. Kathleen and I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle, who were nearby, and my cousin Jane, who still lived at home at the time. Looking at the picture of John, Kathleen, Ann and Jane tonight, I realized that my late uncle was a year younger than I am now, and my aunt quite a bit younger — probably not even Kathleen’s age.

But the most remarkable photograph that I saw today was posted by my daughter at Facebook, and that’s another story!  

 

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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