This was my dad’s table in his room, his last residence ‘above the grass’ as he used to say. He finished out his life at the Maine Veterans Home and the folks there were good to him. The environment was what he needed to bring his life full circle.
In 2019, Dad’s table was filled with memorabilia from the various articles I had written about his Navy service during WWII. Nevertheless, it was his trip to the Washington DC memorials with Honor Flight Maine that he proudly shared with anyone within earshot.
What can I say beyond Thank You
to Charles Crosby who, as publisher of The Cryer gave me all the ink and paper space I needed to share the stories of good people helping our veterans. Dad always wanted to be in the Navy. Happily, the veterans home and Honor Flight validated that brief interlude before work, career and family took center stage.
My Dad’s Table
My dad collected and displayed every print copy that was available. Honor flight was the trip of a lifetime. A trip of recognition for service given with nothing expected in return. His was a generation where tactile feel and visual permanence was found in printed pages.
He enjoyed his newspapers. He enjoyed seeing himself and his friends in the news for good reasons. Community ones. He collected everything in print and displayed his favorites on his walls and on his desk – no longer used for business. Just for show.
Today’s world
Today’s world has less connection human to human. Less connection of person to permanence via ephemera, “the minor transient documents of everyday life.” As with my dad’s table, these documents were most often paper based items. Printed things that included ticket stubs to shows, perhaps menus from a favorite restaurant, postcards, greeting cards and even stickers.
Most all of the above items have gone ‘digital.’ Gone are the days when invitations and RSVP’s were in print and replied with handwritten responses. My dad’s table and the drawers beneath it were filled with physical representations of memories. Today we call anyone who has too many of those items, a hoarder.
Today it is primarily the resurgence of stickers as an art form that preserve the link to the past. Art in its best incantation is something physical that we can hang on a wall. Indeed, we see fewer people owning homes – even art on walls are luxuries that get the space to be displayed.
For the same reason, I only just rediscovered this digital image of my dad’s table as I was clearing my hoard of digital documents (dated April 19, 2019 to be exact) that are taking up storage that I’d rather repurpose for other newer digital documents. By transferring this image to a blogpost, I wonder if I am just shuffling storage locations or hopefully capturing emotion and story that support the very reason I took this photo years ago?