Commentary by Wayne Lee
I was once again going through boxes upon boxes of the photos and things my mother had saved over her 88 years on this floating rock. Since my last going through, even more boxes of items arrived for me to inventory, and I found an article from a Detroit paper dated September 16, 1946. It was a story and photograph of my uncle.
It seems that back in 1946, at the age of eight, he was upset over a spanking. He loaded up all his belongings in a little red wagon and headed to a destination unknown. He didn’t care. He had enough of this unfair oppression and was going to move on, wherever that was. There had to be a better life somewhere.
As the picture shows, he was intercepted by the local police before he got very far and was returned home, probably to face another spanking. I now know where my urge to question authority and set my own path came from. Sorry mom, part of this is on you and I apologize for carrying on the family tradition.
In any event, life moves on and I do the best I can to be a positive influence on the community I belong to. I love this place and I am blessed by all those who I have come to know and those who I have yet to meet. But back to the mountain of pictures that seem to grow exponentially.
There are boxes everywhere with photo albums, many of which have old, loose, black and white pictures randomly tossed in. Some I recognize as family members, and some are just people my mother knew as either friends and/or co-workers, but I couldn’t identify. I was amazed at how easily I recognized the first house I ever lived in.
I was only five when my family went broke, packed up what we could carry and flew to Los Angeles to live with my grandparents until we got resettled. You may recall a goofy movie comedy called “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”. One of my earliest memories as a now six-year-old was riding the bus with my mother and little brother to do some shopping when I looked out the window to see a camera truck filming a bunch of actors in a big, red, Cadillac, followed by another big camera truck speed by. That was Introduction to Hollywood 101 and how life in Southern California would be the total opposite of all those isolated snowy days in northern Illinois.
Three years later my parents divorced and once again I was on the move with what little I could take with me as we packed up and moved north to Sacramento. The family we lived next to in Dundee, IL years ago had relocated to Sacramento when his job at the Santa Fe locomotive yard was eliminated, and he moved his wife and six kids to California for a job with Southern Pacific.
They were kind enough to let us live in their garage for more than a year as my mother looked for a job, and then a car she could depend on to get her to the job. Our car broke down on the trip north and was pretty much useless.
And yet the pictures kept coming. Photos of that family we lived with and the weirdness of becoming neighbors once again when the house next door became available to rent. We moved in and as Yogi Berra was fond of saying, “It was like deja’ vu all over again.” As the pictures continued, the memories came flooding back of the places I had been, the people I had met, the schoolyard friends I will never forget, and a thousand memories of experiences, both good and bad, that I hope to take with me to my grave. It’s been a life and what more could I ask for?
