the way we were -- maybe

Two weeks ago, I started watching the films in my DVD collection that have been awarded the Oscar for Best Picture (move on).

Last night, I had made it to 1993 with Schindler's List. Capturing the horrors of the Holocaust on film is always difficult. How can the horrors of that spasm of hate be portrayed at a personal level without losing empathy in a terrifying cascade of numbers. How can the mind wrap itself around 6 million Jews being killed for just being Jews?

Spielberg did it by letting us look at individuals and how the constant terror of death affected the people with names. Names that are repeated in the film. Names that would constitute Schindler's famous list.

But there was another scene that always makes me catch my breath -- both in this film, other documentaries, and at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

Piles of photographs. Photographs that arrested families gathered up in a hope of cherishing, for at least another generation, memories of faces that would fade in time. Just as the memories would.

But these photographs would no longer accompany families on their journey through life. They were stripped away by German guards who would -- sooner, than later -- gas those lives into oblivion. We now look on the photographs that will no longer be fondled by their original owners.

Photographs are a funny thing. My mother is currently going through her possessions trying to decide which pieces should be given to family or friends. I have talked with friends who have parents making similar decisions.

One item keeps coming up in conversation. Photographs. Most of the people I know are in a quandary. Because family life has changed drastically even during my lifetime, my friends do not have any recollection of most of the people in family photographs. And show little inclination in becoming the guardian of the family heritage.

I once was counted amongst The Indifferent. When I moved from Oregon to Mexico, I threw away handfuls of photographs. I saw very little value in toting them with me to Mexico -- only to see them slowly fade into oblivion.

But, for some reason, I kept a few envelopes. I cannot tell you why I chose some over others. But they are now here in the house with no name.

Maybe it is the same feeling I get when looking at piles of photographs of those murdered in the Holocaust that I realize hanging onto a piece of our former lives is important. Everything we have touched in the past is a part of who we are. Why not bring some mementos along with us the rest of the journey?

I am still reading Ted Kooser's Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems. One line from "A Color Slide" struck me as being particularly poignant today. Kooser is looking at a slide he took of his grandfather sixty years prior.

He didn't look up to see me there, taking
his picture. He was looking for weeds, not
immortality, but this stamp-sized piece
of colored film and three grandchildren,
all in their seventies now, have given him
another fifty years to be remembered,
the blink of an eye.

Photographs may not grant us immortality, but they do give us a brief renewal of life's lease. Maybe just long enough for those who do remember us during their lives -- fingering photographs of people whose names and lives have begun to fade.

We should not be quite so cavalier with old photographs. Because of circumstances, some end up in museums.

But some end up in hands of people who remember us -- and maybe they will smile. For just a moment.

That is good enough for me.