(no subject)

Being at my grandmother's house and looking through my grandfather's possessions was a strange experience. My mother, her siblings, and her mother (my grandmother) spent most of the day looking through boxes and boxes of pictures. They were deciding what would be in the memorial, and how to sort out the rest of them. I saw tons of pictures I've never seen of my family, and look forward to having copies of some of them. Maybe I'll share some here.

They were also going through a lot of things like holiday cards or birthday cards that were made or given to my grandparents by their kids, or vis versa. The family members were all very happy to have things like that. And I really thought they were pretty neat too. It was great when people read excerpts from elementary school report cards for my uncle, or birthday cards from my mother when she was little. I liked seeing these glimpses into parts of my family members lives from well before I had entered the scene.

And this puts me in something of a quandary. I've gotten to a state of mind where I want to have fewer possessions in my life. I have a tub full of all the birthday and Christmas cards and things like that I've recieved, and I'd kind of decided that I was going to throw them away. I thought a lot about it and concluded that I'm probably never going to open them up and read them, or put them on display, or anything like that. They'll just sit in a box until I die, and then my family (Whether I will have any children seems uncertain) will have to deal with them. Why not just save the effort, and avoid having them taking up space for the next bunch of decades?

But if they make surviving family really happy to have, maybe I have some sort of obligation to hang on to them. It's something of a puzzle. Honestly though, I think I'm still leaning toward not keeping them. For me, photographs have become something of a memory focus. I plan to keep taking lots and lots of photos through my life, and my surviving family will probably have enough of them to keep busy for quite a long time. And there will be all my other possessions too. I was talking about this with my youngest brother, akreaveter, and his comment was that my family members were probably happy just to have anything of my grandfather's. The fact that they were all these cards and photos was tangential to the fact that they were memories of him with personal connections. Those photos I looked through with my family this past weekend were definitely that. I hope that, someday, my photos will be as well. And maybe I can add all the photos there that we looked at to my own digital collection. I think I'd like that.

(no subject)

As well as photos and paper ephemera, I looked through some of my grandfather's things in his office and workshop. He had quite a collection of books about horses and about metalworking. He had quite a number of smithing tools around too. This Summer, I will get the forge and anvil out of the basement a few times and use some of them. Hopefully I can get a few plant hangers made before visiting Ceilidh!

He had a number of miniature anvils on a shelf in his office. Some small and cutesy, but some that were big enough to be functional for some uses. I saw one that I knew my sweetie lisagems would be able to use. I think my grandfather would be happy to know that it was being used. I gave it to her yesterday, and I'm happy to know that it has a good home with someone about whom I care enough about to want to give it to. She'll appreciate it, will clean it up, and use it to make things. There's beauty in that utility that I like to think Grandpa would appreciate. There were so many random things around the rooms he used that I wish I could ask him about the history of. I wish that I'd had more time during school to get out and visit.

My grandmother also gave me Grandpa's camera. It's a Pentax K100. I don't know a lot about Pentax hardware specifically, but it's a nice DSLR. A neat thing about Pentax is that they have not changed their lens mounting system for a long time. I can use any Pentax K-mount lens made since around 1975 with that camera. Other than having to deal with a bunch of manual controls (which I think I know enough theory of operation to do), they'll work just fine. There's a part of me that's really excited about learning to use it.

Most of me, though, starts crying when I take it out of the diaper bag he used as a camera bag ("Nobody's going to steal that!" he commented) and start looking at it. Especially when I look at the pictures of my family that are on the card from the last times he used it. I was going to use it to photograph the protests here in Chicago this week, but I don't think I can deal with it yet.