I mentioned last week I’d probably divert from the calendar entries for a few, and write a couple posts based primarily on my grandpa’s photos. Indeed.
Two years ago around this time, I wrote a post about a gorgeous, timeless heat-of-summer photo my grandpa captured.
Most likely, it was taken July 31, 1975, during a visit to Cove Island Park, a public park in Stamford overlooking Long Island Sound.
The picture I wrote about isn’t the only great photo my grandfather took on that trip. Y’all wanna click on this and look at it full-size for a minute:
(Yes, there is a honkin’ big hair-thing in the photo, probably an artifact of the scanning process. I look at it from a Zen perspective: All things manmade must have a fault somewhere, or else they wouldn’t be manmade. Look past it, out toward the eternal sea.)
I am guessing the woman in the picture — laboriously dressed to block the sun, even on a 90-degree day — is my grandmother. She would have dressed like that to go to the beach.
And, since the original calendar entry mentions “lunch at Cove Island,” it’s possible that the bag or basket in her hand has a couple sammiches in it. It’s not a large bag, but my grandparents were not gluttonous.
I’m not hung up on literal reproduction of the day’s events, though. What I like is the story between the lines.
Check out the woman in long sleeves and pants, separated by both height and distance from the faraway figures on the beach.
She is so close to freedom and relaxation and pleasure, she can practically reach out and touch it. And yet, it is not hers to have.
Her clothing and posture suggest a certain fundamental ambivalence about it. She has deliberately brought herself to the place of sun- and sea-worship, but has come prepared to deny herself any participation.
Down on the beach, practically at the photo’s center, is a young family — what looks like two parents and a small child — suggesting fertility, vigor and action. Up on the viewing deck is a single person, suggesting stillness, confinement and loneliness. Is youth a release? The image suggests so.
Both a fence and a road separate the woman from the beach. In the endless dichotomy between civilization and nature, man and wilderness, she is staying firmly planted in the known, sanitized, well-defined world of settled life.
There is no visible threat to keep the woman on the deck away from the beach. No riptides; no thunderclouds; no crush of towel-to-towel, shoulder-to-shoulder bathers.
She just chooses not to go, even though the grass beckons with a wonderful deep green, and the sky presents a tapestry of deep blue dotted with cumulus white.
Also note, while we’re at it, the rich marine blue color of the observation deck. It’s sorta like a copy of the ocean … a flat, tamed version of the sea in which even the likes of my grandma can feel comfortable parking her feet.
I am sure my grandparents eventually made their way down to the beach, got comfortable after a fashion, and enjoyed their lunch.
But in this single fall of the shutter are more complicated possibilities.
Hope Street 
Great writing – and thinking, underlying the writing. And you really are on to something, maybe more than you realize… There is an aspect of the family DNA, which you inherited, which prefers to observe life rather than dive right in. It comes naturally to us, and on occasions should be fought vigorously!
But back to the mundane – that is your grandmother. At this stage of her life she did not want to get too much sun. I was thinking how unusual it would have been for her to have bare arms, but when I enlarged the picture she is clearly wearing a flesh-colored blouse/shirt so she’s completely covered. And yes, that’s a box of food, not her handbag.
And the “honking’ big hair-thing” is no artifact; it’s a hair, either preserved on the original slide or added from my depleting supply when I scanned it.
Nice!
“There is an aspect of the family DNA, which you inherited, which prefers to observe life rather than dive right in.”
Perhaps it is that quality that leads me to spend hours at a computer writing about family history, when I could spend the time interacting with my wife and children.
(Though I do most of my writing for Hope Street after the kids are down. Clears the mind.)
“And the “honking’ big hair-thing” is no artifact; it’s a hair”
If I’m not mistaken, “artifact” is a slang term for hair, dust or other blotches introduced to an image during the scanning process.
Though if someone who worked at Kodak for many years does not recognize the term, perhaps it is not as common as I believed.
I thought “artifact” was something artificial, something that didn’t really exist, that the photographic process du jour created, like pixillation or a reflection or a color not present in the actual scene. And I didn’t think a hair qualified because it was a real hair, most likely mine. But maybe a hair qualifies because it was not really part of the scene at Cove Island. For yuks lets see what your brother, the digit head in the family, says… Or any other reader of this blog!
As your heir, I suggest you are splitting hairs.
I agree the photo is very telling, in that it pictures your grandmother observing the seascape.I believe she and Grossee used to prefer eating lunch under the trees, while your grandfather would either take pictures of them eating (one of his favorites) or wander to take photos. Your father and I would enjoy the water, when we were young enough to travel to the beach with the family. Upon enlarging the photo, I think I recognize the pant suit as a hand-me-down (or up) of mine, which was your grandmother’s custom to save pennies!
I thought an artifact was a cultural tool of sociological significance. Perhaps not.
[…] I missed that one, myself, but I don’t see too many films, anyway. Cove Island, which has previously appeared in this narrative, also shows up in the […]