Perhaps a mild psychosis...?

This phone-photo I have from work today might show what I mean about 1948 color in my late Grandmother's photo album. The second picture is distorted, and probably ugly, but to me it is a holiday in some safe, accomplished, maybe polished past.

Present

1948

By the way, I don't know why I choose "1948" as the year. After being fascinated with World War Two as a kid, I remember suddenly aware of these "mystery years" in history, immediately following the war. 1946, The Best Years Of Our Lives, was black and white. 1947, I remember mostly dim, boring travelouges in color. 1948, suddenly America had this golden ---but not golden, more like firetruck red ---age.

This is like being able to share my own color blindness, except it's not color blindess but memory blindness. This mystic time before I was born, memory blindness.

Grandmother caught on to my love of history and nurtured it very deliberatly. I was also interested in the flags of the nations, The Revolutionary War, and Andrew Jackson, whom I pretended was our relation. (He was my imaginary friend until once he drew his sword on me, in a rage over something I said, I forget now. Miss him.)

Grandmother (and she did insist on being addressed as "grandmother", because she thought 'Grandma' sounded rural, and too old) bought and scotch-taped brown facsimilies of The Declaration Of Independence and Poor Richard's Almanac to her light blue kitchen walls for me. I was amazed that people so long ago knew their alphabet, except for 'f' and 's'.

Another photographic note: Andrew Jackson lived from 1767 to 1845, and I read every book I could find about him but all of his pictures were as the founding fathers'. There was no photography, of course!

Grandmother and I both knew this. They didn't have cameras in 1845, see. (And I didn't believe at the time that painters back-when actually were able to really capture a true likeness of a human being.)

Then, The Day Of Mutual Amazement. We found a book in the library stacks on Jackson which we'd missed over many visits and , well, look at this.

1845

There were a few others by the same photographer, the same sitting (they say it was only days before his death. 'Don't cry, he told his slaves, we will all meet in heaven') but this is the one we found, and I believe I stared at it for at least an hour, the first time.

It was just impossible. But it was him, all right. There was something he was thinking about, I wondered what? (There is a thought taking place when you take a picture of someone. It's in their head, there.)

Probably that the neck brace to make him sit still for the exposure was either A)evidence that this was for real or B)something they should have told him about before he agreed to sit, because he wasn't going to ever put up with this crap again.

That, for me at age nine or 10, was like stepping into a new dimension of course. It was time travel, it was magic, and it was scary.