I try to catch dinner with my folks at least once a week, and we try to center the event around television shows we all enjoy, from time-shift tapes of Star Trek: Enterprise and JAG to the first season of Have Gun, Will Travel on DVD. Tonight, after Enterprise, we assembled my father's Kodak slide carousel and an ancient Da-Lite projector screen, and took in a narrated show of the slides my father has been revisiting.
Most of them were from the late Sixties or early Seventies; my father as a college student in Syracuse, New York or my parents as newlyweds in Washington, D.C. Some I hadn't seen before; others were old favorites.
My father doesn't remember what he and his brother had argued over. What he does remember, thanks to the photographic process, is the stroke of his artistic revenge.
We went through two slide trays; the second held a surprise. Towards the end of the show, my father turned to a slide of an ink design of an eagle's outline, white on black, a music staff and notes inside the positive space.
"Do you recognize this?" asked my father. He went one slide further, and I did: the image in front of us now was a design I had made for the same occasion three years after someone's creation of the preceding image.
My high school's old band director, now nearly ten years retired, had a favorite fishing spot up in Gravenhurst, Canada, and in the course of his travels met and made friends with the resort town's band director. Every three years thereafter, goes the legend, his best bands would take a trip up to Gravenhurst in the winter and host Gravenhurst's bands in the spring. The triennial fell on my freshman and senior years; I played well enough to join the highest-level band my freshman year and ended up making the trip twice. In this photograph students of the 1996 wind ensemble, the orchestra, and accompanying chaperone parents had just entered Gravenhurst's high school after a seven-hour bus trip. Tired, hungry, expectant, impatient.
When my father turned the projector to this slide, I jumped up, walked to the screen and began naming nearly every face from a decade ago. The fellow in the upper left-hand quadrant wearing the Fedora is my good friend Ed — who slept in our host family's computer room, discovered an installation of classic Myst on the PC and played it until near dawn each night we spent in Gravenhurst.
That's me in the center wearing a green jacket with, yes, an Empire Strikes Back sleeve patch.
READING, WRITING, WRONG: The powers that be reminded me that the trip is triennial. So adjusted.