The latest version of iPhoto includes face recognition technology, so I've been going over all the photos in my library to tag all the people.
And I came upon this photo:
That's my mother standing on the far left; then there's her father (i.e., my grandfather), my father, and her brother, my uncle Pepper (I can never remember why he was called Pepper).
Seated is my aunt Jane and I presume it's my uncle Allen snapping the photo; I mean, where else could he be? Next to Jane is an unknown girl holding Debbie, who is Jane and Allen's super-obedient dog. Debbie is a very famous dog in our extended family and probably deserves a blog entry all her own sometime.
The other seated woman is my grandmother who has her arm around her youngest son, Reed, who is technically my uncle, even though he's only two years older than I am. Which also makes him my mother's brother. Sometime I have to write about the nasty trick he played on me while we were out sledding.
Anyway, that's me standing and holding what appears to be a bottle of Coke.
The picture was taken in the living room of our house on the farm. Notice the high ceiling; that house was built in the mid-nineteenth century.
Also, notice the doorway on the right, and how it's decorated with Christmas cards. Remember Christmas cards? I mean, back in the day we used to send and receive a boatload of Christmas cards each year.
Oh, and hanging on the wall is a portrait of me as a baby. Shortly after I was born, while my uncle Neal was stationed in Okinawa (he was still in Okinawa at the time of this photo; I had never met him to this point), my mother sent him a photo of me; Neal had a local artist turn it into an oil painting on cloth. That painting became an ever-present fixture of our living room; I believe my mother still has it.
But what I find really exciting about this photo is what you see in the foreground: my model train set. That had been my Christmas present that year, and I almost didn't get it. You see, on Christmas Eve I had a hard time sleeping, probably due to a combination of anticipation of what the morrow would bring and the fact that the family party was still going on downstairs and they were making an awful racket.
So I came paddling down the stairs. The stairway had a door at the bottom that led into the kitchen. Opening the door, I could see into the living room, where there was a large plywood sheet being propped up by a couple of sawhorses with my father and several of my uncles standing around it. They all looked very surprised.
Without missing a beat they told me that Santa had been there to deliver my present, but when he heard me coming down he had to run away. If I wanted him to return, I had better get back to bed ASAP!
Needless to say I did as I was told.
That Lionel train set became a holiday staple for the next few years.
The other item of interest in the photo is what you can't see; on the reverse side of the actual photo is the date, February 1953. That was presumably the date the photos were developed, making the actual date of this picture probably the last week of December 1952. Meaning I was about three and a half years old.
And that helps me to date another important event in my life, the day I got my arm caught in the washing machine wringer. I remember that we moved to the farm shortly after that harrowing experience, so this photo not only documents our first Christmas on the farm, but it also lets me definitively date the arm-in-wringer incident to shortly before my third birthday.
That wringer story deserves a post of its own. One of these days...
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out who that unknown girl in the photo is.
