In Search of a Family Portrait (Part II: The story behind my album cover)

I recently recorded a new album called I'm From Here whose title track is about the differences between where you're born, where you're from, and where you call home, and that really, we're from people, not a patch of dirt. I decided that the album cover should use an old faded color photo of my parents on Long Island that hung framed on the wall of my mother's bedroom for as long as I can remember. It looks more like an accidental snap than a portrait. It shows the two of them, elegantly attired, staring enigmatically off to the left, my father's right arm around my mother's waist, his left arm extended out of view of the camera, and with what looks to be the window of a house hovering at a strange angle like a floating apparition behind them. The photo has an almost isinglass-like patina to it, and is set in a beige-yellow mat mounted in a gold-painted frame. Many folks could probably peg it as a photo of an early-30s married New York couple in the Kennedy years, but what I see is that my father looks like a man instead of the 26-year-old kid he was in their wedding pics, and he looks healthy, as the picture was taken before his cancer returned.

Lookin' fly, mom and dad.

For context purposes, I need to summarize the original lengthy post I wrote in September 2020 about how, after my mother's death, and with time on my hands during the COVID isolation, I scanned all of my family's thousand-ish slides, and was stunned to find that not one of them was a picture of my father, mother, sister, and me together, leaving the sole Siegel family portrait being a copy of an expressionless Polaroid snapped by a relative in the driveway of our house in Old Bethpage. But it kind of made sense: My father was a good photographer who was quite adept with his Minolta, so he was usually the one taking the family pics. There are glorious Kodachrome snaps of my sister and me with our grandparents that make you feel you could time-travel by diving into them, and occasional photos of him with my sister and me when he handed the camera to my mother, but there were far fewer photos of him than of the rest of us, and no slides of all four of us. When he passed away in 1968, the photo-taking largely went with him. There is only one photo of the remaining three of us from those years we lived in Amherst, and none from when we were in Lexington. While I wished there was an image more evocative than this accidental stiff Polaroid, I'm glad beyond words that it exists. Plus, the trove of all the other pics that I uncovered of my childhood in Old Bethpage is precious to me, looking through it was and still is addictive as fuck, and that's far more important than the fact that I can't wrap it up with a Hallmark-style family portrait.

The cleaned-up version of the only photo of my family.

Back to the album cover. The graphic artist who was doing the design work asked if I had the original slide of the framed photo. I knew that I'd run across it during the slide-scanning project and, like the graphic artist, assumed it would be better, but when I called up the scanned slide on my laptop, I found that it has a very different feel than the framed pic from my mother's wall. It's not cropped, so you can see my father's outstretched arm looking like he's doing the Futurama "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!" thing (and is he pointing at what they're staring at? I still don't know.), and you can see that the window isn't some ghost-like entity but is part of an actual house, but the perspective is very strange, with my parents standing vertical and the house looking like it's tilted at an angle. And with the better resolution and color, you can see that my mother is dolled-up for whatever the occasion was; her lipstick, pearls, and black evening gloves are all much more visible. Yet, although the slide image is objectively superior to the old print, it doesn't trigger the feels for me that the faded framed photo does.

Clearer, yes, but not as evocative.

So I took the picture and the mat out of its frame, scanned it, and directed the graphic artist to use it as the album cover and to perform only the bare minimum processing necessary. I love the way it came out. It has the intended effect of looking like a cloudy window into my past.

Thank you, Eric King

As the March 1st release date of the album approached, I decided to make a video of the title track that draws from my archive of scanned slides to depict those eleven short years I lived in Old Bethpage (as well as my Amherst and Newton years). Obviously, as part of that, I wanted to use photos of my parents. And having pored over the scanned slides dozens of times, I knew that, unlike the portrait of all four of us, the album's cover photo wasn't the only one.

However, I was quite surprised to find that, aside from their wedding photos (scanned black and white prints with a very formal feel), there was just one other high-quality scanned Kodachrome slide of the two of them together—an early picture of them taken during a pre-wedding visit to Washington DC in 1955, showing that there was apparently just a single time they did the "Hey, could you take a picture of us?" thing. There were photos taken during their honeymoon, but they were of my mother or my father, never both. The enigmatic framed photo was the only one of its kind from the 12 years they were married.

It's trite to say "they look so young," but they look so young.

As I searched in another folder of scanned physical photos, I did find one other one—a damaged black and white pic likely taken shortly before their wedding that was charming in its own scrapbook way but didn't have the depth and resonance of the Kodachrome slides.

They were a cute couple.

When combined with some of the posed wedding photos, it was enough for me to make the video, but even with the "my dad was the photographer and selfies weren't a thing yet" thing, I found the scarcity surprising.

While putting together the video (which I'll release on March 1st along with the album), I needed a few pics of me in Amherst and of Maire Anne's and my time with the kids here in Newton, so I dove into our physical photo repository. Ever since I joined the iPhone-obsessed masses, I've been diligent about unloading photos off my phone and into sensibly-named folders. While much of this is to keep car pics organized to facilitate my automotive writing, it also helps me keep personal pics organized (unlike everything else in my life). The old-school physical photos, though, are in three different places in the house, and tend to suffer from a natural sort of spreading out. You know—you go looking for pics of one of your kids for a birthday email, you pull a bunch of them out and scan them, but they never go back into their original envelope. Or if you're going to a reunion, or if an aged relative passes away, you may pull out pics that span decades. This makes loose photos proliferate. You probably put them together in a box, maybe with an envelope for the fragile old ones.

I discovered one such envelope, and while it didn't have more photos of both of my parents, it contained something unexpected—hardcopies of pictures from some of the scanned Long Island slides. I recalled seeing these over the years in birthday cards or family projects my mother would occasionally send me. I hadn't revisited them because the scanned slides are of much higher quality.

But looking at them now, I realized something: My mother had to have gone through the old slides, likely loading them box by box into the old-school ger-CHUNK-gsh-WHACK projector, in order to have had these hardcopies made.

And then came the big epiphany: That's why the framed photo of her and my dad existed and had been hanging in her bedroom for decades. She found the slide and chose to have the picture made. She knew it was the only photo showing them together as a mature married couple. No wonder it hung there until she passed away. Its faded patina, not-a-portrait quirkiness, and what-are-they-looking-at mystery only add to its appeal.

A few days later, I remembered that a few years ago, as a favor to a dear family friend, I scanned her family's slide archive, freely admitting that my ulterior motive was that it might contain pics of my parents. And it did; I remembered finding several and copying them to a clearly-labeled folder on my laptop. I revisited it. There were four. Two were of a visit the two couples made to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens when my mother was nine months pregnant with my sister Amy, and no one looks particularly photogenic.

But the one was taken on the beach after my sister was born is a delightfully intimate shot of the new parents. My father's face is turned away, and my mother's is in profile, but she's smiling, and they appear attentive and loving. It's a wonderful photo.

I think both my sister and I still have Jones Beach sand under our nails.

The last photo, taken maybe a year and a half later, isn't of just the two of them, but it has a great vibe all its own. It's part of series of pics taken at a party, showing my smiling parents hanging out with two old friends I recognize, everyone looking relaxed and happy. Further, although I can't be certain of the veracity of the dates, the label on the slide carousel from which it was taken read "12-58 to 3-59." That's six months after I was born. If it's true, I love the fact that they're at a party and maybe Amy and I are with our grandparents. I remember seeing the photo after I'd scanned it, but looking at it now and knowing its rarity—no, its uniqueness—I realize what a gift it is, especially in the context of the shitstorm that dropped on them later with my father's illness. 

A little slice of heaven in 1959.

My mother often commented that she and my dad only had 12 years together. The scarcity of photos is certainly a byproduct of that. But like so many other things, you learn to be grateful for what there is. Seeing my dad, smiling at me through 66 years, sitting next to two of his childhood friends from Brooklyn, my mother relaxed and smiling and smoking a cigarette, makes me smile back at them in a way that a formal portrait never could.

--Rob Siegel

The Water Heater Story

[Note: When I finally redid my website earlier this year, I thought I'd put this blog to bed and incorporate any new long-form posts into the website. That hasn't happened. So, once more unto the breach. The breach being in my water heater...]

Okay. Here’s the happy ending of the water heater story: I found a plumber who did what I wanted, which was to simply swap the old passively-vented unit for a new one, and did so for a reasonable price. He came today. It’s done. I want to hug him, but he’s from Lynn, and not a hugging guy.

Here’s the longer story. Despite the wonderful mock-up by Eric King, it's not quite enough to get a book out of, so you're going to get it here.

Eric King designed my last five books, and does these great parody covers as well.

What I’ve learned is this: Forget politics. Forget music. What do people REALLY want to talk about? Water heaters. The number of responses to my two Facebook posts… holy crap.

But seriously… what I’ve learned is that living in a high-income suburb like Newton, the five-star-rated plumbers who quickly return emergency calls and come within a day for a visit are extraordinarily expensive. Some of this is not unreasonable—I mean, you have to have a staff of people to be able to allocate some of them to emergency calls. And living here, it’s understandable that some folks prize customer service over cost. But even given that, some of the quotes I got were thievery.

To recap: On Sunday morning, Maire Anne and I found that we had no hot water. I went into the basement and found the water heater leaking. Fortunately, it hadn’t leaked much. I shut off the water valve and drained the rest into the basement sink.

Ruh roh.

When I began writing about this on Facebook, I said that the water heater was 16 years old. I knew this because when it was replaced, I did it myself, and in traditional macho-man fashion, messed up my back, from which it took years to recover. I wrote about it in Roundel Magazine, and again in my first book. I just checked the date of the magazine article. It was February 2005. With the magazine’s two-month lead time, that meant it happened in late fall/early winter 2004. So more like 18 years old.

Funny thing is, I was wrong, as when I checked the label on the water heater, I found it was manufactured in December 2015. Neither Maire Anne nor I have any recollection whatsoever of it being replaced seven years ago.

Ah, memory. I used to have one.

Anywhoo, on Sunday, I set out to get a plumber in. While I’d replaced the water heater myself in 2004, I had zero desire to do it again, as my recent re-injury of my back in late August has only partially healed, and I’d feel like an idiot if, after a month of twice-weekly physical therapy, I fucked it up again replacing another water heater. I’ve been fairly pain-free for a few weeks, but I know that my back is like a giant compressed spring wrapped up in Scotch tape that’ll go TWANG if I disturb it. So, yeah, while I COULD’VE gotten out of it by spending $600 to $900 at Home Depot for another passively-vented gas water heater and replacing it myself—even, for the moment, assuming that I had other muscle to get the old unit out and the new one in place—I knew that all that bending and crouching would mess me up.

And about that question of hired muscle… I did that once when I needed to dispose of a 32” Sony CRT that was on the 3rd floor of the house. The hired muscle was so incompetent that they were in danger of falling down the stairs with the television landing on them and suing me. So forgive me if I didn’t jump at the suggestion that all my problems would be solved by finding two guys on Craigslist to muscle the new heater into the basement and the old one out.

Plus, this is an odd installation. When our master bedroom was put into the attic in 1995, the brick chimney got taken down and was replaced with a horizontal vent pipe and a blower fan that exited the back of the house and vented both the furnace and the water heater. And when the garage was added onto the back of the house, that vent pipe was extended through the garage and a second blower fan installed at the end. There are sensors on the water heater that turn on both fans when the heater fires. When I replaced the water heater myself, I transferred these sensors over, and for some reason couldn’t get them to work. I had to call a plumber to figure it out.

The shared vent.

The tangle of sensors

For both of these reasons, I was perfectly happy with paying someone to show up with a new one, install it, and make the old one go away. I was expecting it would cost about two grand—roughly $1000 for the heater plus any odds and ends, and roughly another thousand for the labor.

I went to the Home Depot website and filled out the online form for “need water heater installed,” checking the “emergency” box. No one ever contacted me.

I began posting these travails on Facebook, and there was a strong contingent that said, basically, "If you don't take this opportunity to install a tankless water heater [one that flash-heats the water as it goes through, thereby providing unlimited hot water without needing to keep a 50-gallon tank hot], you're an idiot." I kept an open mind about it, but really, I just wanted hot water without having to pay for home infrastructure improvements.

I have a folder for house receipts, but couldn’t find the most recent big one for plumbing (we had the furnace replaced in 2008) or for the water heater that apparently was changed in 2015. I DID find a small receipt for a guy in Waltham. I asked my friend Alex, the contractor who’s done most of the work on the house, about this guy, and Alex said “He’s great, but he’s so expensive I no longer use him.”

I called him anyway. His voicemail had a “dial 1 to schedule an appointment, dial 0 if this is an emergency” message. I dialed 0. He called me back later that day, said that yes he could probably swap in another water heater for about $2,000, and that he could have a look on Monday. I told him that if he could do it for that price, absolutely. As part of this conversation, I asked him about a tankless water heater. As per prior FB post, he explained that it needed to be mounted against an outside wall, needed its own vent, and needed a bigger gas line, and that the cost would be 3-4 times that of a conventional water heater (so, $6,000 to $8,000). Since we have plenty of hot water from a standard 50-gallon tank, and since I think the odds of us staying in this house long enough to pay back the difference are slim, I had little interest in paying a premium for tankless.

But when this plumber came, he looked at the shared-venting two-fan thing, balked with concern about liability and code violations, and said he’d need to think about it. He called me back on Tuesday morning, said he didn’t want to touch the existing vent setup, and gave me a quote for a power-vented water heater (meaning a water heater that has its own vent motor integrated to the top of the heater). With the new ductwork required to give it its own vent, his quote came to $4,200. Yikes!

I caught my breath, thanked him for coming on Monday and calling me first thing on Tuesday, and said that I’d need to seek other quotes.

I then contacted a company in Watertown that was highly rated on a Newton-related Facebook group. They also had an emergency number, also called me back quickly, and scheduled an appointment for later that day, which was confirmed by voice, text, and email, so big points for communication. They sent over a young man who took a lot of photos and went back to his van a number of times to communicate with the mother ship. The very first thing he did was connect a pressure gauge to the outside hose spigot and noted that the water pressure was high, which he said could lessen the life of the appliances and cause warrantee issues.

He then told me that code in Massachusetts required a passively-vented water heater like mine to be vented vertically out the roof. With the water heater in the basement of this three-story house, you can imagine how invasive and expensive it would be to run a vent pipe out the ceiling. Therefore, he said, the replacement would need to be either power-vented or electric.

When he showed me the quote on his iPad for an electric unit, I nearly gagged. It read like the worst-imaginable fully-loaded new car quote from which you need to delete the extended warrantee, the undercoating, and the ermine mudflaps. The highest-level quote? $7,887 (yes, nearly EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS). It included a safety valve breaker shutoff for the feed to the water heater, an expansion tank, a corrosion protector, a $3,199 electric water heater (street price about $930), $1,400 to wire in a 220V outlet for the heater, and a $1,270 charge for a full warranty. If you pared it down to the essentials, it was $4,527 for just the electric water heater and the 220V wiring needed to run it.

In addition, there was a line item was to install a pressure regulator after the main water valve to knock down the high water pressure. The cost: $1,500. I later looked it up. The valve is a standard $200-ish item that I could order and sweat-solder on myself. Plus, Newton is known for having high water pressure, and it’s generally viewed as a positive thing.

Nuts, right?

So I tried again on three fronts. The first was I called a company in Dedham a good friend recommended, and left a message. I then tried Angi (formerly “Angie’s List”). Their water heater step-through process was quite good, having you specify gas or electric, tank or tankless, venting, and whether or not it was an emergency. The final checkbox said something about authorizing additional marketing from Angi’s representatives. I checked it with hesitancy, and gave my never-used landline and the email address I only use for one-time registrations.

But after that, Angi was pretty good. It gave you a list of matching vendors, showed their reviews, and had a push button to solicit quotes from them as well as a push button to get quotes from the top 15. I hand-selected three who sounded more like working plumbers and less like customer service organizations who happened to employ plumbers.

The third thing I tried was actually going to Home Depot to grok water heaters—look at them, measure them, shove them around, entertain the notion of installing one myself with help from Ethan. I found the candidate Rheem 12-year 50-gallon unit. The box said "160 pounds."

No.

On the way out of Home Depot, I stopped at the customer service desk and asked about buying a water heater and getting it installed.

"You have to go through the process online."

"I did."

"Is yours leaking? Did you check the emergency box?"

"Yes."

"And no one ever called you?"

"No."

"We can call installations directly for you."

"Call—you mean you'd be contacting someone who's not here in the building?"

"That's correct."

"Thanks, but no thanks."

The first call I got wasn’t from Angi’s—it was from someone at the company in Dedham. She said that they could have their plumber Dennis there at 8:30 Wednesday morning for an estimate. I was a little bit frazzled and said something like “I hate to waste anyone’s time. If Dennis is going to say that he can’t just swap out the existing heater with another one due to code issues, never mind, but if he can be more creative, yes, I’d love to get a quote.” I know, it was dumb. She hesitated a bit and said “You know, I don’t think I want to deal with you,” and I can’t say I blame her. I thought about it for a moment, called her back, pleaded my case of having just received two insanely high quotes, said that I may well have to suck it up and spend more than I’d like, and that, yes, if I haven’t burned my bridge, I’d like to have Dennis look at my system.” She scheduled it.

Shortly after, I got a call from Matt at Matt Evans Plumbing and Heating in Lynn, one of the plumbers I’d contacted via Angi’s (this turned out to be the ONLY response to the three requests I put out on Angi's). I described the situation and texted him photos of the unusual venting. He said “Yeah, I can just swap it out, no problem.” I said that I had another estimate scheduled for the morning, and that I was hesitant to have visits and estimates overlap—that I’d much rather do it one at a time—but that I’d be back in touch.

Dennis came at 8:30 am this (Wednesday) morning. I liked Dennis. Great south shore Massachusetts accent, no-nonsense way about him, yet also funny. He didn’t seem to think that the horizontal through-the-side-wall venting shared with the furnace was out of code, but he DID balk at the setup with two blower fans. He said he’d need to check if it was allowed by code, and if the fan manufacturer allowed it.

The vent and blower in the basement...

...and the continuation that runs out the back of the garage.

When I didn’t hear anything from Dennis by around noon, and had been without hot water for the fourth day, I messaged Matt. He called me shortly after and said “I don’t have anything today. I’m ten minutes from a Home Depot. I could pick up the water heater, have them call you to put it on your credit card and drive right to your house. I charge $650 flat install rate. Your electrical hookup is unusual, so I’d add $150 for that. Plus incidentals.”

“There’s a Home Depot 20 minutes north of me in Waltham," I said. "Are you SURE you don’t want to come here first and look at my setup?”

“Honestly, it won’t matter.”

“Uh... yes please!”

True to his word, about 30 minutes later, I got a phone call from Home Depot in Salem asking for my credit card for the water heater. I had him buy the Rheem 50-gallon with the 12-year guarantee, about $950 including tax. About an hour later, Matt and an assistant showed up with the water heater and had at it. Other than him not installing a drain pan under it (I just assumed he’d install one, but there hasn’t ever been one), and there being some challenges with getting the unusual triggering of the blower fan when the gas lights, requiring a trip to Home Depot for some fittings he didn't have, there were no surprises.

So it’s done. We have hot water again. And his bill was as quoted—just a shade over $900, an amount I was happy to pay. I bought them pizza as they were finishing, and tipped him. He left around 8pm to do another job on the north shore.

Yes!

I was never trying to get out of paying a plumber a reasonable amount. I just didn't want to be put over a barrel (which, perhaps appropriately, is the shape of the water heater).

So, if you’re local, BIG shout-out to Matt at Matt Evans Plumbing (https://www.mattevansplumbingandheating.com/). I often say that I’m an old-school guy in that doing what I say is important to me, and I have a lot of respect for that in others. Matt’s a young man, but he did exactly what he said he’d do. Nice to know that it's not just an old guy thing.

The Slide Show: In Search Of A Family Portrait

When my mother passed away last summer at age 89, it took a while for my sister Amy and me to deal with her possessions. There was no real rush; she and Amy shared a house, it was paid off, and Amy still lives there. But one of the things I was most interested in was the collection of the family’s slides.

My parents died 52 years apart, my father having passed away in 1968 of metathesized thyroid cancer. There were several operations, even an early treatment with radioactive iodine. It was the kind of thing they could cure now, but as I understand it, my parents were told in 1965 that he had about three years, and that turned out to be about right.

Nonetheless, my sister and I had a wonderful textbook middle-class upbringing in Old Bethpage Long Island. My father was an electrical engineer at an aerospace company, not Grumman but one of the smaller firms who supplied Grumman with electronics for the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) it was building for the Apollo program. My mother had not yet blossomed into the queen of wisdom and kindness she eventually became; she was a 1960s Long Island wife and mother, and enjoyed both roles.

It's such a cliché to say your parent died young and you’ve spent your life chasing him or her in some way, but there’s some truth to it. I was ten when he passed, so I certainly remember him, and can sometimes even still hear the sound of his voice in my head, but I can’t say I knew him terribly well. By all accounts, he was a really nice, sharp, interesting, funny guy with a somewhat Zen-like way of looking at the world, at least according to my mother. They did an incredible job of maintaining the appearance of normality during the highly abnormal situation of his illness, but there’s not much question that, particularly in the later years, I felt there was a distance, a separation, with my dad. My mother left a big trail in terms of writing, which is natural considering her extra 52 years, but in going through the things she saved, Amy and I didn’t find a single thing my father had written. I guess this isn’t surprising, but I really kind of craved finding something that had his voice.

So all there is left are the photos. And thus, my interest in the slides.

My father was always the one with the camera. It was a Minolta. I don’t recall an armada of lenses, but he was a serviceably good photographer. And he always shot with slide film. I vividly recall watching the slides afterward. The screen set up in the living room. The smell of the heat from the bulb. The ger-CHUNK-gsh-WHACK of the feed and pull-back of the loading tray of the projector. All that big color on the screen, with images nearly an order of magnitude larger than the television. It was an event for the senses.

In 1966, after my father had been diagnosed and had recovered from a round of surgery, he took a leave of absence from his job and the family took a big western road trip vacation. We flew into Denver, rented a car, and saw Bryce Canyon, The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and other sites. I still remember much of it. Of course I didn’t understand the poignancy of this memory-building at the time, but we watched the slides many times, both before and after his passing.

The other thing driving me toward the slides was the question of the existence of a family portrait, even an informal one. About ten years ago, my mother wrote a book for Amy and me. She titled it “Your Father and Me, and You and You (by me).” It was hand-built, with text and photos pasted onto the pages, and contained a detailed and bittersweet recitation of their individual histories, how they’d met, their marriage and relationship, and his passing. I’d never seen many of the pictures in it before. I didn’t think to ask my mother at the time where the photos came from, but I assumed that they were prints of scanned slides, as I didn’t think there really were many other family photos except slides. In one of the photos, my sister and I are probably two and three years old, and we’re standing with my parents at the foot of the driveway of the house in Old Bethpage, placated with lollipops. Over time, it occurred to me that this sixty-year-old picture was the only photo I’d ever seen of the four of us together, which seemed too incredible to even be possible. Plus, it's not a great photo. It’s nothing I’d consider to be a portrait, even an informal one. It’s way too pulled back, and only my dad is looking at the camera. If it wasn’t the only photo of the four of us I was aware of, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. It’s not that I needed reassurance that, with all that pain, we really were a happy family. It was more an odd factoid whose truth I questioned. There really had to be another better family photograph.

The only photo I’d seen of all four of us prior to the slide scanning project (1960)

All of this is ironic, because years back, when our own kids were young, Maire Anne wanted a formal portrait of our family. She mentioned it to my mother, who bought me a gift certificate to get one shot by a local photographer whose work she thought I’d like. I never had it done. Worse, I think I actively scoffed at the idea. In my defense, I was wicked busy in those years at my engineering job, and the idea of any kind of formal portrait struck me as stuffy artificial. To satisfy Maire Anne, I twisted our neighbor Kimberly’s arm and got her to meet us in the park behind our house. I told everyone in the family “wear something white.” Kim shot some black and white pics. They’re great. I can’t say they’re the only pics of the five of us together—I’m sure they’re not—but they’re the only ones that comprise anything resembling a portrait. The people we love are precious to us, and photos of them with a certain expression or vibe are treasured. All the family, together, with great expressions, a collective vibe, and well shot, be it by amateur or pro, by framing or by happenstance? Why wouldn’t you love a photo like that? Maire Anne, of course, was right: Such a thing is precious.

Our defacto family portrait.

In going through my mother’s things, Amy and I found the trove of family slides. I was thrilled. My vague recollection was that, when we’d watched the slides from the big western road trip decades back, we disgorged them, 24 or 36 at a time, from their individual little cardboard slide containers into the feed of the projector, then repacked that little box and opened up the next one, so I assumed that what I’d find was shoeboxes filled with these little boxes. Instead, there were four boxes—one dedicated metal slide case, two metal boxes with labeled dividers, and one traditional shoebox with cardboard boxes of slides inside.

The metal slide case was remarkable. It had slots that each held pairs of two slides, and on the underside of the lid was a piece of oaktag that contained individual notes on many of the slides. It clearly was purpose-built for this application. I could see, reading the notes, most of which were clearly in my father’s handwriting, that it dated back to when he was in Okinawa in 1952, continued through to Amy’s birth in 1957, and stopped shortly before I was born in 1958. I had no recollection of ever seeing it. In addition to the images it contains, this is a precious family artifact.

The insanely well-documented slide case.

Next were the two metal cookie-tin-like boxes that each contained a high density of slides packed in three rows, with hand-written descriptions on blue oaktag dividers that separated them into numbered groups (e.g., “37 summer 1965 Montauk vacation”).

One of the two well-documented "cookie boxes."

Lastly, there was one shoebox containing traditional little fresh-from-the-developer individual cardboard slide boxes. Most of these held much later slides—late ‘70s and early ‘80s—and some of them were labeled, but a quick hold-up-to-the-light revealed that one of the unlabeled boxes appeared to hold the slides of the family that my mother had scanned and used in the book she’d written for Amy and me. Jackpot.

I talked with Amy about us digging out the projector and the screen—both of which we still actually have—and having a slide show with our (now adult) children, but due to the both the pandemic and people’s schedules, it made more sense to have the slides scanned.

I’d originally assumed that I’d send all of the slides to a scanning service, but seeing the use of paper tabs to document the slides in the three metal boxes, the idea of someone removing them to scan them, possibly not putting them back in the same place, and losing the meta data seemed risky, so I resolved to scan them myself. I looked into buying a slide scanner, quickly learned that the Canon CanoScan 9000F has an extremely good reputation, found one on Craigslist 20 miles from me for eighty bucks complete in the original box and used for one family photo project just like mine, and drove right over and bought it.

The Canon CanoScan 9000F with four slides in the template.

The scanner was not what I expected. I had this image of an automated slide-specific scanner, something like a slide projector into which you load a few dozen slides at a time and it ger-CHUNK-gsh-WHACKs its way through them like a projector does. Instead, what it is is a high-quality flatbed scanner that comes with a plastic template that you place on the glass scanning bed. The template holds four manually-placed slides at a time. The scanner gives you a quick low-res preview of all four, then scans them individually at up to 4800 dpi, though it’s really slow at that resolution; 1200 dpi is much faster and adequate for most applications. Once you get in the rhythm, you can clock through a stack of slides pretty efficiently, maybe 30 seconds each in total, but add in organizing the slides into folders, and correcting them for over/underexposure (I don’t have Photoshop, but the scanner came with some pretty effective software), and it’s slow going. I was vexed by the fact that, no matter how well I cleaned the glass on the scanner, dust and hair kept showing up in the images. I eventually realized it was on the slides themselves, and just let it be part of the visual patina. If I ever need to get a publication-quality image, I’ll clean the slide and increase the scan resolution.

I first scanned the stand-alone little cardboard box of “hallowed slides” my mother had used in the book, and was surprised that it did not contain the slide of the four of us standing at the bottom of the driveway. I then bungie-jumped in, thumbed through the boxes, found the “45 1967 Maine vacation” slide group, and scanned it, as Maine was the subject of my song “The Kittery Bridge,” and I was thrilled to see photos of my aunt Flo and uncle Bernie’s little house in Bridgton and the dock that literally had a barber pole on the end (he was in the barber supply business). But after that, I started at the beginning, and methodically went through the first metal slide case.

It was astonishing. Early photos of my dad when he was stationed in Okinawa. Pre-wedding photos of my parents, looking so young and relaxed. My mother and father in a rowboat, with his tongue-in-cheek hand-written notes “Kenneth and his chest” and “Bim laying sexually.” It’s just my mother in a bathing suit, but these two comments would be as close as I'd get to finding something my dad had written in which I could hear his voice. A trip to DC. Then, oh my god, photos taken on their ski trip honeymoon (funny, since neither of them skied, nudge nudge). Trips to the beach. Visits with my father’s parents in Brooklyn. The first photos of Amy. Photos of my dad with a big goofy smile on his face instead of the more reserved expression he’s photographed with later in life. All in beautiful saturated Kodachrome slide color. My sister and I were stunned. We had never seen any of them.

Kenneth Siegel in Okinawa, 1952. No idea who took the picture. 

Bim Siegel rowing in the Berkshires, 1955.

The not-yet-married couple in DC, 1955.

My dad looking in credibly relaxed before Amy was born, 1956.

It wasn’t only the great photos that were compelling. Some were so underexposed that you had no idea what you were looking at. As I said, I don’t have Photoshop, but playing with the histogram equalization in the scanner software brought some of them back into the light. This one turned to be my mother, wearing a nice dress, laying on the bed of what must be a hotel room. For a nice Jewish couple in the 1950s, this was probably perilously close to shooting porn.

Ooooh la la, right? 

In scanning the photos, though, it was soon apparent that they were out of order, jumping around a good bit. I made a brief attempt at trying to correlate them with their descriptions on the underside of the lid, and also to re-home some of the slides my mother had pulled to make the book (I assumed that her going through them to find slides for the book was probably the source of their getting out of order), but it was very time-consuming, and I had three other boxes to go through, so I gave up.

As I started scanning the second box, which began approximately with my birth, I was hoping to find a better photo of the four of us, or at least find the original slide from which that only existing photo was taken. I found so much more.

Of course, once Amy and I were born, the photos our parents took were mostly of us. And, of course, now, I wanted to see photos of them. However, scanning the photos in order, it was oddly compelling to watch Amy and me grow up in a sort of a time lapse.

Now, I’ve spent much of my life distancing myself from Long Island. It’s not that I hated it or felt like it was just filled with bad memories or anything, but we moved up to Amherst in 1969, the year after my dad passed, and I instantly loved Amherst. I came to increasingly regard it as where I was from. It was natural that, 50 years later, with no family on Long Island, I’d lose ties with it. But the combination of my mother being buried there last year next to my dad, and seeing all these photos of the little house at 15 Adrienne Drive Old Bethpage NY 11804, was highly effective in reminding me where my roots really are.

There were photos of the house my parents paid $19,500 for in 1958 being built, transforming in eight slides from a bulldozed lot to a framed structure to a complete unit. There were goof-around photos inside and around the house. There were many photos with my always elegantly-attired grandparents, who were just over in Brooklyn. There was a photo of my father’s entire family, their names and my connections to them now gone (he was an only child, but in one of my conversations with my mother in her final month, she enumerated all of my grandparents’ siblings and their children, but I was so in the moment with her that I didn’t write any of it down). There were birthday parties with neighborhood kids I instantly recognized. There were vacations on Montauk, on Cape Cod, on Sandy Island, in Maine. There was evidence of a few hilarious lapses in attention from my wonderful parents. I’d scan the photo groups, put them in a folder named with the always-informative notation on the blue cardboard divider transcribed exactly, then upload it to Google Photos and share it with Amy, and we’d swap OMG emails and texts over them. It was time-consuming but enormously satisfying, even addictive. Neither Amy nor I wanted it to end.

 

Old Bethpage house under construction, 1958

Who wouldn't love to find the first photo of them and their mother smiling at each other? 1958. 

What, they didn't keep a can of Raid a foot from your head while they let your one-year-old sister with an extension cord wrapped around her play with your feet with you in a cradle barely secured to a chair? Must just be a Long Island thing. (1958)

What, they didn’t let you play with a fifth of Canadian Club, Jubilee floor wax, and an egg beater? Must just be a Long Island thing. (1960)

What, they didn’t let you eat raw potatoes under the kitchen table? Must just be a Long Island thing. (1960)

My dad, the fierce mower, 1964.

One of many photos of Amy and me with our loving elegant grandparents, 1965.

But end it soon did. The third box began in 1965, but I could see that it was about half full of much later slides. I was delighted when I found the hundred-ish 1966 photos of our big western road trip, by far the largest single slide group. It’s unclear to me whether these 2^nd and 3^rd boxes—the “cookie tins” with dividers—had been started by my father and then added to and maintained by my mother, or whether she had emptied all of the little cardboard boxes into them—but the “CAL” (California) slides, as they were labeled, were in disarray. They had the original stamped slide numbers on them, but they were from four or five separate rolls, so they couldn’t simply be ordered from these numbers. They also had what appeared to be penciled-in sequential slide numbers, but those didn’t always make sense. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the order right, eventually putting all the numbers, images of the slides, and short descriptions in an Excel file so I could play with order there, and then manually putting the slides in an order that best fit both the numbers and my memory. The slides themselves weren’t as dramatic as I remembered, and most of the photos of vistas that three of us at a time are in are marred by poor framing and contrast issues, but the time spent on them was a labor of love.

That's my mother, Amy, and me center foreground. That's obvious, right? (1966)

Dad, Amy and me in front of a sequoia in Yosemite, 1966. At least we’re facing the right way. 

After the big western road trip, the density of the slides dropped off dramatically, and it was hard looking at them without being palpably aware of my dad’s impending passing in July ’68. There was a slide group of trips my parents apparently took to the Bahamas and then to Virginia in spring 1967. I had no memory of them taking these trips, but thought good for them for getting away alone.

Then I found a very short slide group labeled “spring 1968 Florida trip.” The first slide shows Amy and me under a sign saying “Parrot Jungle Miami Florida” with parrots placed on our arms and shoulders. I vaguely recall both the event and the photo. The next six pics are of other animals. But more to the point, what the hell were we doing in Florida just months before my father passed away? My grandparents had started spending winters there. Were all four of us visiting them? Or were they up in NY staying with my dad while my mother, Amy, and I took a vacation? It didn’t make any sense. This was one of any number of things where Amy and I messaged each other saying rhetorically "Ma would know," but it was the biggest.

It was the last photo in this group, a photo of my mother, Amy, and me, that unexpectedly blew me away. I don’t know who took it. My mother is wearing a winter coat I remember well. It’s brown with a beaver collar and cuffs. I remember loving the way the fur felt, and in the pic, my fingers are dug into one of the cuffs. I remember her saying that it was her present to herself because during the last years of my dad’s life there wasn’t a lot of money. She no longer looks like the young woman in the earlier photographs. She looks like the mother I knew for the rest of my life—kind, yes, wise, yes, but at this time, fierce, focused, and decisive. And the three of us have a certain weariness on our faces, as if we all know what’s coming (my mother certainly did).

This 1968 photo breaks my heart, but it's totally us.

And then I realized. Like it or not, it’s this photo, this pic of my mother, my sister, and me, that’s the definitive Siegel family portrait. It wasn't what I was looking for, and it certainly wasn't what I wanted, but there's no denying it. It made me so sad, both because I knew there wouldn’t be any more fresh photos of those early years, and because I knew what came just months after this, that I nearly cried. But if my father is the one standing out of the frame holding the camera (and the more I think about it, the more that makes sense, as I cannot imagine my mother leaving him), what could be a more perfect metaphor for him fading out of the picture?

When the man who usually held the camera was gone, so was the source of most of the photographs. Although we had another eight years as a family of three before both Amy and I were both off at college, there are only a few dozen slides of those years, they’re scattershot and generally of poor quality, and only one of them shows the three of us.

Fast-forward 42 years. On my mother’s 80^th birthday ten years ago, Amy and I took her to New York to see a show. Before we drove home, we stopped at my father’s and grandparents’ old apartment building at 2201 Troy Ave, Brooklyn, corner of Troy and Flatbush. I had a small non-phone camera with me. I asked a stranger to take our photo with it, and something went wrong. It wouldn’t snap a picture, and we couldn’t figure out why. We were disappointed that we couldn’t get the family portrait our grandparents would’ve been so pleased that we took. When I got home, I realized that the camera had been set to video, and what it recorded was us trying to pose and then talk with the guy about why it wasn’t working. It was adorable. I pulled a still photo from the video, had a couple of hardcopies printed, and late in life it became our quasi-official family portrait.

The family in front of my father’s and grandparents’ old apartment in Brooklyn in 2010.

So, after scanning 1,034 slides, I did not find what I was looking for. Not only hadn’t I found another photo of the four of us together, I didn’t even find the original slide of the hardcopy of the only existing one of us at the end of the driveway. But at the risk of sounding after school special, I found so much more. And I learned something. Unless your family is in front of it, no one wants to see another photo of the Empire State Building. But all those people snapping selfies in front of spectacular places like The Grand Canyon and Half Dome? They’ve actually got the right idea. Whether you’re going through your parents’ pics, or your kids are going through yours, we want to see the same thing. We want to see the smiling faces of the people we love. Because that's downright precious.

And if you find one with all of you in it, all looking at the camera with joy in your eyes, maybe you frame it and put it on your nightstand. Maybe you just like knowing that it exists. But treasure it, because, as I learned, even in a happy family and a thousand slides, its existence is far from guaranteed.