#52 of 52 : ENNIS

External Photo Clues:
Date Stamp 6/54

Imagine:
Ennis lived and died broke, but he was never not happy. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 52 →

#51 of 52 : GARY IRELAND

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:

Gary Ireland was born in a small, isolated town in western Oklahoma of about 1,000 people.  His formative years included World War II when all the resources of the United States were dedicated to the war effort and the subsequent boom years when the men and women involved in the war came home.  His world consisted almost entirely of the events and experiences in his hometown and he experienced both austerity and plenty.  This was a good time and place for a young boy to grow up.

Gary was smaller than most of the other children his age, but he made up for his size with an incredible amount of energy and speed.  His short legs were a blur as he ran around town with his friends, spending most of his free time on the sidewalks, streets, alleys, and vacant lots of his hometown.

Today, this would not seem like a good, or safe, way to grow up.  But, in reality, the children were free to learn and experience things that would stay with them their whole lives.  They created their own forms of entertainment and solutions to problems as they worked it out with each other.  More importantly, every man and woman in town acted as surrogate fathers and mothers as the children ran around and experienced the delights and freedom of their childhood.  Adults observed what happened and they either dealt with any sign of a misdeed or quickly brought it to the attention of the appropriate parents.  Gary’s parents were always among the first to know, as they ran the grocery store on Main Street.  The African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child” was at work in western Oklahoma.

One particular group of older men spent most of the day observing the events in town.  They were known as the “spit and whittle club”, a less-than-complimentary term used by the rest of the town to describe what seemed to be their only activities, chewing tobacco and carving wooden trinkets with their pocketknives.  Their daily schedule was to follow the shade or the sun around town, depending on the season, and to watch and discuss the events around them.  They also had their favorite dry or protected spots when it rained or the north wind howled.  One of their favorite winter expressions was “there’s nothing between us and the North pole, except a barbed-wire fence and it’s been blown down”.

Actually, the spit and whittle club spent their time observing and discussing the human condition, politics, religion, philosophy, sociology, and the weather.  The weather may not seem to fit in that list, but these men were survivors of the Great Depression, the worst of the Dust Bowl, and were located in the middle of Tornado Alley.  One of the deadliest tornadoes in history had happened in 1947 just up the road in Woodward. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 51 →

#50 of 52 : EDDY AARON

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
Eddy Aaron is a name that I had somehow forgotten until receiving the news of his untimely demise. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to dig through an old box of relics. When I came across this photograph a memory came flooding back; the kind of memory that leaves you wondering how you ever forgot it in the first place.

I knew Eddy from St. Peter’s, a private school for boys in Clinton, MI. We were introduced behind the maintenance shed where some of the students would hang out and share cigarettes, adult magazines, alcohol, and whatever else they had managed to smuggle back from their weekend trips home.

Eddy was a regular at the spot but he wasn’t around at first because he had been on a home suspension for pissing on Coach Davis from the roof of the school. He claimed that he was trying to put out the coach’s cigarette as an act of encouragement. Smoking did not fit into the healthy lifestyle that the coach preached so sternly. By the time Eddy came back to school I had already become somewhat popular thanks to my stories of St. Mary’s.

St. Mary’s was a co-ed school that I had attended before transferring to St. Peter’s. The transfer had simply been an attempt to relieve some of the financial burden created after my dad was laid off and forced to choose a more humble career path. But that’s not the reason I gave my new friends.

It was clear that stories about girls were the quickest way to earn the respect and admiration of my fellow classmates. I started by telling them about how we would frequently hide in the girls’ locker room and watch them shower after gym class. Truthfully, I’m not even certain there was a gym.

When they pressed me for more details I told them about the time I was caught by Veronica, one of the most physically detailed fabrications I ever created. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 50 →

#49 of 52 : RAYMOND & SADIE

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:

LANEGANICS

“Look happy!” Cleo Cliffords knelt down. He pointed the Brownie at little Raymond and Sadie. They looked happy, because they were happy. They played all the time and giggled and really liked each other. It was the one lucky thing in Cleo’s life — his kids were ignorant.

…

“There’s going to be a scientist who finds out how to get to the moon, but he’s not going to find out happiness. It’s not science.” – Pat Lanegan, Fiftyfold It Comes In: Putting Yourself Out There!

Cleo Cliffords sold things. Or, as he liked to quote Pat Lanegan, he formed relationships with people and they communicated with goods. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 49 →

#48 of 52 : GRANDMA, MOM, JOEY

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:

Betsy Behind the Camera

I didn’t understand why Mom wanted to stop there.  She just pulled the car over into the hard sand next to that deserted road that was taking us south from the Oregon woods of my childhood to the California desert I have spent the rest of my life in.  She didn’t trust Joey with the camera and Grandma insisted she wasn’t touching the new-fangled gadget, so it was up to me to snap the photo that Mom wanted to remember this moment by.  But what moment?  I asked myself that as she tucked the sides of her skirt down—as she always did in those days, to make herself look thinner—as she fussed at Joey fidgeting endlessly with some toy soldier or other, and as Grandma couldn’t decide where to stand, given Mom’s insistence that she drape her hand casually over Joey’s shoulder and lean into him as though this were some family portrait.  “Little man of the house,” she always called him, it having been just the four of us, three women and Joey, since Dad left when I was about Joey’s age.  He never knew Dad, didn’t remember the deep rumble of his laugh in his chest or the fresh soapy scent of him leaving for work.  That’s how he smelled the last morning I saw him—when he went off to work and never came home.  I remembered and I think Mom did but we didn’t talk about it.  We didn’t talk about much in those days, any of us.

That’s part of why I was so surprised that when I got the camera ready and snapped, Grandma asked Mom something I couldn’t hear and she turned away from the camera, her hand still carefully posed on Joey’s shoulder.  My very first time behind a camera, and this is what I got.  You’d never guess from it that just a few years later, after finishing high school, that I would be in art school, turn to photography, and get obsessed with the alien landscape of the desert that, in the moment of this image where I am standing behind the camera, I hated with everything in me.  What were we doing, picking up and moving away from everything and everyone?  How could we leave our home, Dad’s home?  I didn’t care that the photo was probably ruined; I just wanted to go, to keep going, to stop thinking.  So, I waved them back to the car, promising that the photo was great.  When we settled back in to finish the drive, Grandma seemed want to continue the conversation they had started during this photo.

“That sure is a funny tree, Judith.  I can see why you wanted a picture of it.”

“Mmhmm,” Mom assented with her dark red lips firmly closed, sunglasses sliding into place behind her ears.

No one said anything else as we drove on, and by sunset we neared signs of civilization and found our way to our new home: a bungalow in Lakewood, California, that the previous owners had painted a deep yellow.  It had functional shutters even on the upstairs dormer windows of my room, and when I wasn’t shutting out the oddly bright light in those first weeks after the move, I would sit at those windows and look down the street, picturing us as we pulled up.  Tumbling out of the car with dusty shoes, Joey nearly asleep and taking up half of the backseat.  I snapped a picture of the house then, in the golden evening light.  It would have been the next one on the film after this one.

I never saw that house photo, but this photo Mom liked, in spite of its ruined pose.  It just appeared on day about a month after the start of my freshmen year in a small frame on a shelf near the front door, next to a picture she had taken of Dad and me with an infant Joey in front of our old house and a framed wedding announcement for my parents, “Judith and Joshua,” it read in raised letters.  I didn’t know the meaning of that assembly of items, but it had always seemed purposeful, like a shrine to something I couldn’t understand.

Maybe that’s part of what drove me into the desert as my first photographic subject for my senior project a few years later, even when I no longer saw that shrine every day.  I photographed everything out there—from waving grasses to abandoned snakeskin.

It was Laurie, my roommate, who, having grown up in that dead space between the San Francisco and LA suburbs who first said it to me: “Gee, Betsy, what a great Joshua Tree!  It looks like a monster coming out of the sand.”

She was waving a sizeable color print of one of those trees—the ones I first looked at in framing this image with my mother’s old Kodak.  It was one of the few times in over a decade that I had heard my father’s name spoken aloud, and my mind went back to that gathering of objects that had never changed no matter what other redecorating happened in that house.  I thought of this photo then and still think of it now as the last one with my father in it, a kind of goodbye but also a way his place in our new home.  I don’t know if my mother thought the same thing; I never asked her, but I think she knew.

About The Author:
Monica F. Jacobe holds an MFA in creative writing, with a specialization in creative nonfiction, from American University and a Ph.D. in 20th-century American literature from The Catholic University of America. Having taught creative and academic writing for nearly a decade, she currently teaches in the writing program at Princeton University. Monica has earned a number of fellowships to support her creative work, including from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Writers @ Work. “Pieces of Her” is drawn from a memoir manuscript that explores what it means to grow into womanhood without a female role model in twenty-first-century America. Other selections from it have appeared in Under the Sun, Del Sol Review, apt, Crosscut, The Ward Six Review, and R-KV-RY, among others.

Join:
The Imaginary Family Project on Facebook

About The Imaginary Family Project:
The 2011 Imaginary Family Project is a year-long collective art endeavor coordinated by occasional amateur artist Quentin Bomgardner and co-sponsored by The Red Dirt Chronicles.  This project is based around “lost” vintage photographs, which have been acquired at flea markets, garage sales, estate sales, and eBay – heirloom collections, with no heir.  Every week a different author will “find” one photograph by creating an imagined history around one of its subjects.  At the end of the year, the collection will be compiled and presented as a group.

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#47 of 52 : THE KALIN FAMILY via ELDRIDGE BENJAMIN

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:

The Skin I’m In

Well, she actually sent it. She sent it to my office. I’d never given them my home address. They’d never asked, not that I care. I don’t even understand why I’m even thinking about this. I was sure I’d put them behind me. But, looking at this picture of my ‘family’, I do feel something. I’ve considered waking Nzhinga. She’s great at this sort of thing. I’m not.

I’m looking at the photograph again. I examine the face of Edmund, my ‘brother’. At only 19, his drinking has clearly taken a toll on his body. Apparently, he’s close to his niece, Mildred’s daughter. I almost feel programmed not to look at Mildred. My mother often explained that it was loathsome enough to be ugly on the outside, and the very least I could do was to avoid ugly thoughts. I regard my mother’s countenance. Even though I’m thousands of miles away, I can’t help but to feel like she’s judging me. Her scowl suggests that, as I stand in her judgment, the verdict is unfavorable. It’s as though her disapproval has, somehow traversed the sea, implanting itself into my life. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 47 →

#46 of 52 : HER AUNT

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
The sun was bright but the air was cool as it blew in across the ocean.

Her feet were bare but there was no joy from the sand squishing her toes.  She recalled that feeling used to give her such joy, but that was a long time ago.

She’s older now but she doesn’t have much to show for all the wear and tear.  She’s tired and sat down but soon regretted it for the grit already made her uncomfortable.

She tried to not let her grump spread.  It’s not the beach’s fault.  It’s a great view, a lovely moment in time.  It is just a reminder such moments haven’t been too forthcoming lately.

Maybe it was her fault?

She was willing to shoulder some of the blame, but not everything that has happened to her was a fair cause and effect.  She was then annoyed with the whiney tone she had taken in her head.  She just let it go and then lay down.  She looked up at the clouds.  She remembered she used to do that too.

Calm. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 46 →

#45 of 52 : SAMUEL AND JEREMIAH PAINTER

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
Most people thought him crazy or just dismissed him completely but my brother and I could see a glimmer of truth in old man Dalton’s eyes as he rambled.  A clever man, disillusioned by the many tales he told – so much so that the lines blurred between fantasy and reality.  Then again, where better to hide the truth than amongst several tall tales, protecting it from the distracted masses where only the most passionate seekers would glimpse it and take hold.

Having been heaved forth from deep within the earth millions of years ago the mere existence of the ancient mountain range beckoned, “Come find me.”  The diverse ecology of the Wichita Mountains provided ample places in which to conceal secrets and fertile ground to inspire treasure stories.  The rocky crags even bore his initials.  Was he “him”?  Did he fake his death?  Was the Mexican loot there, the bounty bank right under our noses?  Oh it was there, every bit of it – and probably more!  We could hear it calling to us, taunting us in a game of hide and seek. 

I mean why else would Frank keep a home near it and visit so often?  A farm that cultivated nothing but late night rides at break-neck speed?  Was he searching for something or wanting to be near a supposedly dead brother?

The Good Book says that a wise man keeps his own counsel and that’s exactly what we did.  An occasional influx of people, mostly curiosity seekers, would cause us to momentarily halt our efforts so as not to arouse suspicions or draw them near us.  Those were the times we found most frustrating, not the endless days of searching bramble, wandering deer trails and moving rubble.

The talk increased and spread so far it caught the government’s attention, which all but crippled our efforts.  They obviously found merit in the yarns because establishing an artillery practice area and a wild life refuge in the same vicinity seemed a bit contradictory and created their own conspiracy theories, thus adding life and validity to the account.

Determination and dreams forge us ahead though.  Indian arrowheads abound as does the occasional artifact and trinket, down payments on the promise.  Only time will tell but, we’re close…oh, so close.  I can feel it in my bones, taste it.  Tomorrow.  Yes, tomorrow.  

About The Author:
Tammy Mullins is a published children’s author has been a contributing author and editor of several text books for legal support staff. She is active in her local church community, the Tulsa Orchid Society, and the Pride of Owasso Marching Band. Tammy resides in Owasso/Collinsville, OK, with her husband and four children.

Join:
The Imaginary Family Project on Facebook

About The Imaginary Family Project:
The 2011 Imaginary Family Project is a year-long collective art endeavor coordinated by occasional amateur artist Quentin Bomgardner and co-sponsored by The Red Dirt Chronicles.  This project is based around “lost” vintage photographs, which have been acquired at flea markets, garage sales, estate sales, and eBay – heirloom collections, with no heir.  Every week a different author will “find” one photograph by creating an imagined history around one of its subjects.  At the end of the year, the collection will be compiled and presented as a group.

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#44 of 52 : MAXWELL PHINEAS QUALLS & SCRAPS

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
 As a school assignment, we were asked to write about someone in our life that influenced us greatly. My teacher, Mrs. Fletcher, said that it needed to be someone other than our immediate family. Most of my classmates struggled to come up with someone, because people in rural Oklahoma seldom had meaningful contact with people outside their immediate family. I was one of the fortunate ones. I had known a man of unbelievable depth and character that came to teach me things that would make a far greater human being. The man in the photo above was, and still is, the most influential man I ever met.

It was a hot August day when Maxwell Phineas Qualls, MP for short, came walking up the dirt road that was our driveway. He was accompanied by his dog Scraps. I was on the front porch peeling potatoes for my mother. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 44 →

#43 of 52 : ANN & DEBBIE

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
Harry stepped forward, then back, to the right and then to the left. He wanted to frame the photo just right. “This is the first day of the rest of your life!” he said to Debbie.

Ann and Harry had been married for almost 2 years when Debbie was born.  Harry doted on Debbie. He named her after his mother. Debbie came early and was sickly. Harry took his job as her father, her protector seriously. Ann didn’t know what to do, but she did her best to take care of her.

Debbie was allergic to almost everything it seemed. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 43 →

#42 of 52 : AUNT CLAIRE

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
A ninety- three year old man sitting in a wheelchair by the walkway in front of the old folks’ home.  He’s nervously rubbing his nubby hand which, due to an accident at the old saw mill, hadn’t had five fingers on it since he was fourteen. His “claw”, he would laugh and pat his soft half two fingers with the left good hand. “WAR wasn’t interested in me on count of not enough shootin’ fingers.  Hell don’t bother me none, never really cared for IT neither.” He is waiting for someone but growing impatient as he looks up at the library clock next door. “I don’t know why they put this damn concrete everywhere, nobody uses sidewalks anymore anyway! Everybody drives cars nowadays sept you!” He cried to the young woman running hurriedly towards him. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 42 →

#41 of 52 : CLIFFORD, EDDY, and FRANCES (not shown)

External Photo Clues:
None

Imagine:
The afternoon was so hot and still that the only real signs of life were the locusts humming lazily in the trees around the neighborhood. Clifford, Eddy and their next door neighbor, Frances, were sitting in the shade of Frances’s willow tree, discussing their entertainment options, which were a little lean that day. Continue reading The 2011 Imaginary Family Project – Week 41 →