Memory Trippin'...

So yesterday...I go to visit my mother who is now...76...

My father happens to be out of the country for a couple of weeks so I took the day off to go spend the day with her...Little did I know we'd walk back in time...

My mother was listening to a folk station on her satellite radio...She's listened to folk music as long as I can remember...

So I'm there for a few minutes and on comes Bruce...not only Bruce but more obscure Bruce... How about that...Mom had cool Bruce blasting from the speakers...

It was, "My Father's House," from the Nebraska album...an album really only endeared by the hardcore fan...

Folk music is what I grew up on when I was really young...It would surprise most...And of course as I began to explore my own autonomy as a kid and began to denounce everything my parents were imparting upon me...Rock & Roll and it's derivitives became my staple...I was looking forward...not looking back...

But, as time goes on...ang as cliche' as it seems to be....What goes around...comes around...and wouldn't you know it...Bruce's fairly recent Seeger Sessions tour...brought me back home...

I was more than just a little familiar with Pete Seeger...some of my early memories include my mother playing her acoustic guitar to her own Seeger Sessions in the den of the first house I lived in...The first concert I recall was Pete Seeger at Wolf Trap in D.C.

Well, after we had some lunch...I helped my mother with the ongoing task of chronicling the batches of family photos she has collected and is spread out in piles and in albums around her living room...It's our entire family catalogue until my brother and I left home for college...It's one of those tasks that I know my mother feels compelled to do...dating and organizing all of the pictures so that 'someone' will be able to know our story...She's insisted that all of the albums be passed along to my safe keeping once she's moved on...I will keep them...I'm not sure where I'll put the volume upon volumes...but I'll figure it out when the time comes knocking...

Well, we sorted and dated pictures before my time...pictures from her own youth...By developmental deduction, we figure out her age throughout the small collection of black and whites she has...There's an even smaller number of my father as a youngster...but his picture as a two year old is precious...Then there are pictures of them in the 1950's when they met...both at the peak of their youth where innocence and the promise of future shone through...The wedding pictures...yes, they will be married 55 years in December...It was an interesting trip through their lives...

The piles eventually led to my own childhood...and I'm amazed at my vivid recollection of some of those pictures being taken...some as early as 18 months...It strikes me funny since I can't really remember what happened yesterday...

So up through the years...through the chubby years...the bad haircuts...the Halloween oufits that were awesome because my mother always made them...The Elementary School years...where significant flashes of my personality today started bubbling to the top...Pictures of the old house, the new house...the Christmas' where we all changed but the tree decorations did not...The Bicentennial fireworks with millions of people in the background of the family picture on the D.C. Mall...and then I came across it...The black and white picture of Pete Seeger from Wold Trap... It was much like this one...I'll need to get a scan of it on another day...

It was an interesting trip down memory lane at this stage of my life...They are all pictures I'd seen before but this time...seemed different...