One
of the stressful aspects of my recent visit with my sister was our need to
clean out the family archives, and for our family, this was an immense undertaking,
particularly as Dad was the uber record-keeper of his generation.
Not
only did my father have journals going back to the late 1930s from his days in
the CCC and continuing until his stroke killed his ability to write, he also
kept reams of notepads with daily stock market data and bits of travel
information, interlaced with sweet little drawings of nuts and bolts,
literally, that he needed for one project or another. There were his photographs, each one
individually dated and cross-referenced with the roll number and all of the
original negatives. There were the
photographs and records from his work as a structural engineer. It was a whole life unfolding. And yet somehow it didn’t fully capture that
man who was humble and joyful, who was so proud of his family, who was clever
and curious, and who loved to watch things grow.
Though
his bridges and buildings still stand, his artworks have found homes with us,
and his diaries may be useful archives for historians, he, and my mother, will
not live past our own children who knew them.
It is another sobering reminder of the transience of this life.
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