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I began a journey down memory lane yesterday when I wrote a journal entry about how my parents never liked attending the church of their faith that was right in our neighborhood. Instead of a short walk up the hill behind our house to the local church where we might see our own neighbors, we piled in the car and drove 20 minutes each way to a church in the next town over.
As I wrote in that blog, my parents were evasive about why they preferred the one far away. My parents, especially my father, gave only vague non-answers whenever I wondered. After a while I stopped asking.
The truth about the church up the hill came out decades later, not long before my father passed away. He knew he was in his last few months of life. He told me one of his goals then was to square things with relatives who were estranged from him. I wasn't estranged by any stretch of the imagination. I was traveling coast-to-coast every few weeks to visit and support him. During one of our bedside chats he told me the story. Well, not the whole story. He gave me just the one or two missing pieces that allowed me connect up the puzzle from other things he'd told me over the years and from things I remember from as far back as my own early childhood.
The story goes back to the mid 1970s when my dad lost his job as a store manger in a retail chain.
The mid 1970s were a tough time in the US. The country was just coming out of a deep economic recession spurred by the first oil embargo. The recession was probably why his employer folded. And even though the recession was over by the way economists define it, it wasn't over by the way ordinary people might define it. Companies were failing. Those that weren't failing still weren't hiring. The unemployment rate was above 7%. So when my dad's employer shut down and sent everyone to the unemployment line, finding new work wasn't easy. It took my dad months... maybe even a year or more.
By the way, yes, I'm using AI image generation to help illustrate this story. No, I don't have real photos to share from that time. I was too young even to hold a camera then. I mean, I was still filling diapers when this shit went down. And my parents never snapped many photos during my childhood. That always struck me as weird when I was older, because my dad had been a semi-pro photographer when he was in high school and college.
I saw some of his 1960s era work decades later. It was in a box from his mother, who'd just passed away at age 101. It looked good. He could have made it a career. Why did he put his cameras down and then not pick up another one for, like, 40 years? And also, his mom kept copies his vintage work as mementos; he never did. I might've asked him "why?" about either of those facts, but as I already explained early in this story, my dad was famously loath to answer such questions. In that respect he was like a perpetual pouty teenager giving guttural one-word answers.
Anyway, AI image generation. I'm using it here because I think telling the story with some pictures improves if, even if the pics are not authentic. For one, having pictures beats walls of text. Two, I've iterated on the prompts for these pictures to have them reflect, accurately, particular elements of the story. Of course it's impossible to have them accurately reflect everything, even the spotty parts I remember in snapshot memories from my early childhood. I've got a funny story to share about some of the prompting I had to do while creating an image I'll use later in the story. I'll share that anecdote when we get there.
To be continued....
As I wrote in that blog, my parents were evasive about why they preferred the one far away. My parents, especially my father, gave only vague non-answers whenever I wondered. After a while I stopped asking.
The truth about the church up the hill came out decades later, not long before my father passed away. He knew he was in his last few months of life. He told me one of his goals then was to square things with relatives who were estranged from him. I wasn't estranged by any stretch of the imagination. I was traveling coast-to-coast every few weeks to visit and support him. During one of our bedside chats he told me the story. Well, not the whole story. He gave me just the one or two missing pieces that allowed me connect up the puzzle from other things he'd told me over the years and from things I remember from as far back as my own early childhood.
The story goes back to the mid 1970s when my dad lost his job as a store manger in a retail chain.
The mid 1970s were a tough time in the US. The country was just coming out of a deep economic recession spurred by the first oil embargo. The recession was probably why his employer folded. And even though the recession was over by the way economists define it, it wasn't over by the way ordinary people might define it. Companies were failing. Those that weren't failing still weren't hiring. The unemployment rate was above 7%. So when my dad's employer shut down and sent everyone to the unemployment line, finding new work wasn't easy. It took my dad months... maybe even a year or more.
By the way, yes, I'm using AI image generation to help illustrate this story. No, I don't have real photos to share from that time. I was too young even to hold a camera then. I mean, I was still filling diapers when this shit went down. And my parents never snapped many photos during my childhood. That always struck me as weird when I was older, because my dad had been a semi-pro photographer when he was in high school and college.
I saw some of his 1960s era work decades later. It was in a box from his mother, who'd just passed away at age 101. It looked good. He could have made it a career. Why did he put his cameras down and then not pick up another one for, like, 40 years? And also, his mom kept copies his vintage work as mementos; he never did. I might've asked him "why?" about either of those facts, but as I already explained early in this story, my dad was famously loath to answer such questions. In that respect he was like a perpetual pouty teenager giving guttural one-word answers.
Anyway, AI image generation. I'm using it here because I think telling the story with some pictures improves if, even if the pics are not authentic. For one, having pictures beats walls of text. Two, I've iterated on the prompts for these pictures to have them reflect, accurately, particular elements of the story. Of course it's impossible to have them accurately reflect everything, even the spotty parts I remember in snapshot memories from my early childhood. I've got a funny story to share about some of the prompting I had to do while creating an image I'll use later in the story. I'll share that anecdote when we get there.
To be continued....
