This journal tells the story of my parents' photo album. The first entry is page one. I recommend you start reading at the end (July 13, 2008) and work your way back to here.

This journal and this book end about where they started, in my parents' youth with people that I don't recognize. Here is a page with my parents, and their friends, and some random shots from my own childhood. School pictures of my cousins whom I have not seen since they were the age in these photographs. There is a page of city scapes, at last well framed, well lit, and well composed, so I have to make the assumption that my father did not shoot them (or is that mean!).

I will leave this last entry without a photograph, because I think, in the end, that the photos should not be the memories. The memories should be the words and the sense. Before I started this journal I thought that I did not remember my life, but it turns out that all I needed to do was talk about it in a systematic way. I didn't know when I started this that it would become my gift to you, but I hope that the words here, and the pictures, help you to understand my history, and to remember the stories of my parents and theirs, and that you will share the book, and the blog, and the stories with your own children.

As the photos have gotten more recent, and as they have become things from my life, instead of my parents' lives, I've done less introspection and more reporting. Rather than thinking about what or how these photos make me feel, or how I felt on the day they were taken, or what they say about me and my family, I have just been reporting. This happened, and then this. The back story was such, and the picture has trigged these memories. Perhaps this is the path that photos take-- the people in them use it to remember that moment; the next generation wants to know "what was that like, and why did they do that?" A third generation down, it becomes "who are these people and what is their connection to me?"

The next page is full of portraits from the basement portrait studio. Except for one picture of our neighbor Andi, they are all of my father's colleagues from Penn and their wives. If my father were to remind me of their names, I would instantly recognize them, but I cannot bring them to mind here. The lady pictured I remember for her perfume; she always wore the same perfume, very heavily, but somehow pulled it off. I think if someone walked by me today wearing this perfume, it would instantly evoke her image.

Under the slip sheet is the cat, Eric. I think these pictures must have been taken by my mother. Somehow I can't picture my father taking photos of the cat.

My mother used to organize us into fairs-- art fair, science fair, nature fair. This is one of them, with the neighbor kids from the last apartment at the very end of the building. The kids were Dede (Dierdre), Dodo (Dorothy) and Randy, and their mother never spoke above a stage whisper and was always "ill." By which I now understand, always drunk. Never saw their dad. There was another girl about my age, I only remember her mother's name-- Stephanie-- and that Stephanie had had a severe postpartum depression at a time when this was considered shameful, and evidence that you were a bad mother.

Facing page is Hallowe'en on Ellis Road. All the neighborhood kids-- Jan with her cousin Susan and some unknown friend or relative. Diane from across the street with her older brother, who has clearly been coerced into taking her trick-or-treating. My brother and I as Red Riding Hood and, I guess, just a hood. Jan's older sister Julie with Diane's older sisters and another friend. When Julian was little I ran into this friend at a resale shop in Wilmette, and recognized her, because of this picture.

Turn the page and we live in Drexelbrook, which I guess was a rather famous post-war housing complex. (Must have been, as it has a Wikipedia entry.) Whoever put the old album together saved picture after picture of my dad's Rambler parked on Revere Road. I do recall that he really liked that car, but then he was really into all of his cars.

Drexelbrook was apparently a fairly well-known complex. There was a pool where I learned to swim, and a creek behind our house at the bottom of a steep slope. We were not supposed to go down this slope or into or across the creek, but we did anyway, a lot. I don't remember the area in the photo, we used to cross on stepping stones, which I recall as scary and hazardous.

I have a memory of remembering our apartment on Valley Road, where we lived when I was 4. I can't quite bring it into focus, but I remember the apartment on Revere Road quite well. It was two stories, with the stairs directly in front of the front door, Living Room on the right, then dining room, left turn into the kitchen, which let out onto a small concrete porch with 8 or 9 steps that led down to a tiny yard, behind which was a playground. We were the first apartment in a building shaped like a backwards L, at the top of a hill-- to get to the last apartment, you kept going down single steps here and there. If you went left and past the playground there was a hill and a field. I remember being 5 or 6 and having an "accident" (peed my pants); to this day I can conjure the horror of the wetness going down my leg, and remember how hard I cried. I don't remember going home, or if I told my mother what had happened. I can see on Google Maps that this field is now a parking lot with a large commercial building.

At the top of the stairs in the Revere Road apartment a hard right took you into my room, which I recall had a reputation for being really tiny, because it was one of the things my parents promised me when they started looking for a house-- that I would not have the smallest room. I cannot remember my brother's or parents' rooms at all.

Andy and Sandy again. I guess we were a matched set. The bathtub shot that every parent takes for its future torment value, outings, innings (that is, shots at home, the one here looks like the living room at Revere Road), school and chores.

When Nora was 15 we went to Dexter, Michigan and found the house I lived in. I took this picture of her in a deliberate attempt to recreate the photo of me that is sitting (or was sitting) on my father's desk for as long as I can remember.

Dexter House had been an antebellum mansion outside Ann Arbor in the small town of Dexter; it was divided into university housing for nearby U of Michgan and had supposedly been a stop on the underground railroad. I have known this fact my entire life although I don't remember when I first heard it. I think it must have been when we lived there, and that my mother explained what that meant. I doubt I understood the concept of slavery, or escape, or race for that matter. I know that when I was in 3rd grade I did not understand what "colored people" were (that was the term used then). I know this because I can remember my friend Dodo (yes, Dodo, short for Dorothy) talking about someone's "colored" gardener and the image that invoked of a person with skin like a book's endpage-- a swirling kaleidoscope of color. I think this is not so much a beautiful evocation of the natural tolerance of children as of the rigid segregation in which we lived, inasmuch as I never ever encountered people of other races. I can remember vividly in fact, because it was so rare, the few non-whites I met growing up. The housekeeper at Aronimink School; the Hindu girl in fourth grade (also the only handicapped child I encountered), the three black girls at Haverford Junior High.

When you put a photo album together years after the photos are shot you lose any sense of sequence. The pictures don't proceed by the logic of time, but rather by the momentary whim of the arranger. The day I organized the photos I did it sometimes by location, sometimes by date, and sometimes by subject. This is also how my memory seems to work, but did I arrange the photos based on the internal organizing principal of my memories, so do my memories organize themselves based on this book?

The next pages are location: New Haven, where I was born, and Michigan where we lived for a year when I was three. The New Haven page shows the dismal returning soldier housing we lived in that scourged the postwar landscape, my father's first car (a Ford; my father built a little model of this car when I was in junior high. I'll bet you anything he still has that model). Baby pictures, beach pictures including the famous "watermelon belly" shot of me at about the age of one.

I have jumped several years ahead and put the only print photos I found in the album that were shot in Urbana. I assume other Urbana photos are in the slide collection; it's impossible to imagine that there are no photos of Urbana.

This is, however, where my father started to leave us, so perhaps the Urbana photos are not here because the Urbana photos are not of us, and therefore were not interesting enough for my mother to save.

These four photographs are a shorthand of highschool-- sweet 14-year-old Sandy on the porch with mom and brother, giving way to a curly-haired (at great pain) guitar player and a sandal-and-embroidered-jeans-clad young hippie with a "stoned agin" expression on her face. Impossible to choose which to place here, so I will choose to let the reader imagine it.

Turn the page and visit the barber shop and the grocery store. What were we recording? A trip to the supermarket? I can't imagine why this was significant enough to take a picture, and somewhat suspect that this again is my father's pretension, a suburban Walker Evans talking gritty photos of the banality that was a housewife's life in 1965.

I know that my father would have been the grocery store and the barber shop photographer, because my mother was the only suburban housewife in the history of America who could not drive. My father always went to the grocery store with us. It was accepted wisdom that "Olga can't learn to drive."

This is one of the things that I want to know about my mother, that I cannot know. My father will change the history, or give me the public version, and I already know that. Why didn't my mother drive? It made her life difficult and dependent, but it also made her rebellious and unique. In fact, my parents, both of them, were rebellious and unique. Their wholesale adoption of the post-War suburban revolution was always a puzzling disconnect. They were people who should have lived in the city, and sent their kids to the black school, with the artist mother and the playwright father. I didn't really think about this growing up; we were different enough from our neighbors that this camouflaged somewhat how truly different we should have been. We were non-religious, and mixed ethnically; my father had a liberal's job (university professor) and politics.

As a child I didn't know that other people like us-- politically, sociologically and educationally liberal-- did not live like us. They lived in Europe for part of the year, or for several years at a time. The mothers worked, or made art, or marched with Martin Luther King. But my parents, with the same background, attitudes, and potential, bought the whole post-War suburban package.

Julian remarked when we were clearing out May's shop that this was a part of his life that his friends could never relate to-- the immigrant grandparents with the neighborhood-based working class existence. This seems to me like the same thing. There is a part of my life that makes no sense from the outside: why were these urban rebels trying to live like Ozzie and Harriet? You have to live it to relate to it.