When I was a kid growing up in northeast Ohio, I used to go along with my grandma to her weekly chemotherapy appointments at the old Lake East Hospital in Painesville. As I sat waiting with my mom, I’d pore over the pamphlets of historic photos that were scattered throughout the hospital. I was too young to really grasp what was going on, but I knew that it was painful and I needed a distraction, and so I was happy to let my mind wander to imagining what life had been like in my own town all those years ago.
My grandma passed when I was in the sixth grade, and the loss left a void in my life that couldn’t be filled. My grandfather, her ex-husband, was a big presence at times, but his relationship with my mom was marked by long periods of estrangement. My parents had split up while my mom was pregnant with me, and so I never knew my dad or any of my family on his side. My stepfather had lost his dad as a child and had had a bitter parting of ways from his mother after that. When my grandma died a portion of her collection of family photos was passed on to me. It turns out that that’s a lot of responsibility to put onto an eleven year old. My home life was scarred by domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, and a chronic instability. We moved around a lot, sometimes unexpectedly. Somewhere along the way almost all of those photos were lost. I was haunted by the sorrow and guilt of losing these invaluable connections to my own spotty history.
As time went on, I started bringing home photos of other people’s families, photos from antique shops and flea markets cheekily marked “Instant Relatives!” I didn’t know what I was seeking from them, but I knew that I needed them. I knew that they needed to be seen and that they deserved to be cherished, and if nobody else was doing it, well then it was up to me.
In the summer I was forty, I was in my bedroom in my adopted home of Chicago looking through ancestry.com for information on a name I’d found scrawled on the back of a photo I’d picked up. I’d researched my own missing family before and I’d come up with very little, but on this day I stumbled upon my paternal grandmother’s remarried name, Synenberg, and with a quick internet search I found her contact information. That night I wrote her a note asking if she’d be interested in meeting, and she called me on the phone later that week. The next month I visited her for the first time at her home in Madison, Ohio, and I returned the next month to help celebrate her eighty fourth birthday. In the last years of her life we were very close, and when she passed away earlier this summer (June 22 to be precise), I stood next to her husband as her casket was closed for the last time.
I miss my grandma a lot. It is still very painful. Sharing this is therapy for me.
The photos that make up The Old-Time Moan come from shops I frequent in and around Chicago, as well as places I visit in the tiny towns I grew up in back in Ohio. I can’t bring home every photo I find, but I know when I find one that I need. It’s more than “Instant Relatives!”, it’s more than kitsch. I think about the preparation that went into taking them, the anticipation of waiting for them to be developed, the pride of seeing them displayed. Somehow, somewhere, something went terribly wrong and they just disappeared. When I bring them home it’s my way of saying, now you’re with me. You’re far from your home but you’re not lost anymore.
I don’t want to be forgotten either.
That’s it. That’s the why.
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Photo 1: my maternal grandmother, Jeanne Boxerbaum, 1982ish Photo 2: my paternal grandmother, Joan Synenberg, Christmas 2019