Proust and the Time Machine

I have the dubious luxury of possessing a few old photos of myself from boarding school days which my father had lovingly framed and had hung on his bathroom walls at the Westbury Hotel where he had gone to live for about a dozen years while waiting for my mother to change her mind and invite him back to the family.

So, these framed photos of different hockey and football teams from various schools lived curiously enough on the walls of my father's bathroom at the Westbury Hotel. I look at them now with certain affection because he had had them framed. I also see them as souvenirs from another life time.

"Who was that young boy who is actually smiling in the photo?" I think to myself as I brush my teeth everyday while perusing each of the hockey players and wondering what might become of them all as grown men?

All these photos have been shuffled about from New York to France and now they find a new home in Australia. They've been propped up in different bathrooms of mine in different countries over the years. And here they've still found the bathroom to be the most comfortable place I think. After all, they started out on the small walls of my father's bathroom at the Westbury Hotel (where the arch-villain in The French Connection also stayed while in New York). They somehow appear to be subconscious reminders for me to remember to never wait for a woman to change her mind. For that matter, never wait for a woman full stop. Our mother had moved on while he hadn't, poor guy. 

This is a big theme that can shade lots of men and women who try to make a life together, but naturally I was a clueless child at the time. Meanwhile, these photos have become used to waiting around in new and different shaped bathrooms over the years while spanning different continents as well. But I always remain loyal to bathrooms it seems, perhaps out of a fierce loyalty to my father 

Last year I read Swann's Way, the first in Proust's own winding path down through his own memory lane and to the first bite of the infamous Madeleine with his grandmother.  We all have them, these elegiac lightning strikes at most odd moments in our often odd days, these intense memories.

So let's see: in the back row starting from the left is Brad Gifford, the next is a blank, Me number 9 in the middle, Charlie Baker, Charlie Seqriest Front row: John Lee, Charlie Ebles, Kris Kristopherson the goalie, John Belucci, and Greg Bloomfield on the far right.

The photo itself has faded terribly which shows its age. It was the Junior Varsity Hockey team and it was taken in Deerfield Mass. In it, we are all laughing because I remember the photographer had cracked  a  joke to make us smile. This was a lesson I learned well, and stored for later in life when taking my own photographs of uptight or shy sitters. I like that I am smiling broadly in this photo circa, 1964, because somewhere i lost that smile as I went into the rest of my adolescence and adult life.