I turn the page and continue my journey through my mother's life. Strangely, the disconnect in time continues, despite the fact that I sorted and arranged these photos. They were not placed in this album in random order.

On the next page are just two photographs-- another shot of the polo coat, south of France 1951, and a picture that I took with my pocket camera on a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo with my father's best friend Gerald Weales. I've estimated the date as 1966. I don't remember this trip to the zoo at all, but there are lots and lots of photographs of it, or rather, the same photograph over and over, of Gerald and my mother.

Gerald was a fixture in our house. I probably saw Gerald more than any other of my parent's friends, I suppose he and my father must have gone to Columbia together, as Gerald was an English professor, not in the French deparment. Strange to think of my father as having a lifelong college friend. Just like a real person.

Gerald's girlfriend (what in inadequate term) was named Nora. She was not his wife, and I was well into adulthood before it occurred to me that they lived together at a time when this was just not done. After my daughter Nora was born, Gerald's Nora sent a stuffed mouse, also named Nora, that had been given to her as an infant to be passed on to another Nora, preferrably not related by blood. I hope that my Nora will honor this tradition and treat it with respect.

Under the slip sheet, on the facing page we hop around again-- my mother's high school graduation photo and a shot of her in the yard at Revere Road, dressed for my Uncle Lindy's wedding. I know that my mother made the red dress she is wearing, I think I have a memory of that. I remember Lindy's wedding very distinctly, in detail rather than narrative. The church, a big dark stone ediface on a slight rise. All the aunts--10 of them in 2 generations--in pastel lace and pillbox hats or church veils. Lindy was older when he got married and I remember this being something of a family scandal, but now I realize he was probably only 37. His wife was older, and must have been married before, or else was unusually honest for a bride in 1964, because I remember that she wore a light blue cocktail dress rather than a wedding gown. I can see that dress very clearly in my mind's eye: a New Look silhouette with a lace overlay and a simple catholic lace cap rather than a veil.

I also had to wear a lace cap to go into church, despite this being post-Vatican II. I know now that Lindy's wife (I don't know if I ever knew her name, or ever saw her again after this wedding) was a renegade Catholic who kept attending Latin mass and following pre-Vatican II traditions right up to her death 20 years later.

Lindy was the family scandal just in general-- certainly alcoholic and I recall as a child learning not to sit in Lindy's lap, which he usually insisted upon. Lindy was the baby of the family and was actually named Frederick. He was called Lindy because he was born the year Lindberg landed in France. I have no pictures of Lindy.

The rest of this page switches to my father. Again, like all my childhood memories, the album is disjointed and disorganized, flipping through time and alighting on random individuals. Here is my father as a baby-faced young man in a suit, standing in a Japanese garden, and more casually in t-shirt, caught off guard by the camera and looking rather goofily guilty. He also looks like my son in this photo, a resemblance I have not really noted since Julian was a baby.