I have all of my family photos on Mom's side. I've been organizing them, trying to figure out which ones I want to keep for myself and which to give to brothers, cousins or my aunt. I made piles for all the holidays, and Easter turned out to be the second skimpiest. (I only have two Thanksgiving pictures, but one of them is really good.)
But there was a batch of old black and whites in there that absolutely baffled me. At first I laughed. Then I got a little creeped out again. Then I laughed some more. These are so ridiculous that I had to share them here.
Uh, how big are these things?
Okay, maybe not that big, after all. Could you imagine if these fuckers were six feet tall? Not counting the ears?
Like the Teddy Bears' Picnic, but for bunnies.
This looks kinda . . . cultish.
Maybe this is an alternate universe, where rabbits evolved instead of monkeys.
This made me laugh until my balls hurt the first time I saw it. Look at those mustaches! What the fuck possessed them to give the bunnies facial hair? Because it's brilliant. I hope that guy got a raise.
(I'm still kind of laughing at this.)
That's my mom on the left and her sister, my Aunt Sue, on the right. Mom would have been a few months away from four years old, and Aunt Sue would have turned two a few months before. The back of this one is notated with their names and the year in Grandma's handwriting, but it didn't explain the rest of this madness. What the hell are these pictures?
I lucked out. She wrote a few more things behind one of the others:
That explains everything. If you don't know, Goldblatt's was a chain of department stores that operated back then (and they didn't go out of business until 2000). Grandma did a lot of shopping there. When I found boxes and boxes of canceled checks, a lot of them were made out to this place. The building is still somewhat of a historical landmark, but it's mostly used by the City of Chicago now for various things. I wonder if anyone back in 1961 could have seen that coming.
I think often of the transitory nature of the stuff around us. Things that feel permanent actually aren't and may even change within your lifetime.
I've written about it before, but it reminds me of Gramps driving around, waving his hand at the world around us, telling me about how all of this will be different when I'm older. Except I was a kid. I'd only been around for what, six years? Seven? What the fuck did I know of change? As far as I knew, everything was the same as it had been from the day of my birth, so I assumed it would all be the same by the time I was dead.
The older I get, the more I think perspective might be the strongest force in nature.
Just a final note. Aunt Sue is the only person on my mom's side of the family who is older than me. Just in case I wasn't feeling ancient enough today.