Note: This essay or journal entry was the first writing I had done since high school two decades past. It would be the beginning of a renewed interest in writing with many of my articles being published in newspapers and magazines over the next two decades. This was typed on a manual typewriter, which I would use until getting my first computer in 1995 and was written with "kumplete fonetik speling," which I was using at the time. (Now I only use a few fonetically spelled words, "foto" being one of them). I have transcribed it in standard English for the most part. The Fotos by Shale Miami 20 June 1983 It was another pick-up, a donation of old clothes and used household items that they were cleaning from a warehouse and had to get rid of. Apparently, unclaimed for four years, the five drums were unpacked and items sorted for training use or sale in the thrift shop, as each of us watched with curious anticipation the unwrapping of another's life. These unknown persons, we knew were from Jamaica but curiously enuf, except for a few items of foreign manufacture, these were the household and personal things any of us would have saved on moving. Dishes and glasses were packed in clothing and linen. There was children's clothing and books, a few coins, a small round rock, things you would find in a second hand store but here collected for personal reasons known only to those who packed them. The stranger became more familiar. Then came the fotos, three albums, which we casually perused; images of the people who had launched these capsules of their lives, which had strayed into our midst. There were also personal letters and official correspondence, which gave names and events to the still fotos and life to this household corps we ha been dissecting. It was at this point that I decided to find out what had happened to the family portrayed in these fotos. I retrieved all the letters, documents and anything else with an address or lead. 21 June 1983 At home, going thru the papers, the lives of people never met became familiar. The young couple getting married in December 1967 is Marjorie and Dwight. They are my contemporaries; he was born in July 1947 and she on June 26, 1946. She graduated from Buxton High School in 1964, a year after my own graduation in Missouri. In Jamaica in the late '60s, Dwight was working as a draftsman at architectural firms and Marjorie as a clerk typist for courts and legal offices at the same time I was being a cop in New Orleans. In 1968, when my own sister was having her first child, Marjorie was having Toni, their first daughter and families and foto albums started growing. I followed the progression of events in her life, the immigration difficulties, the birth of her second daughter, Charm in 1972; the move to New York in the mid '70s where Adassa, her mother had been living and working as a baby nurse. Even tho we had never met, I had the history of their lives up to 1979, the last date on anything in the drums. There was a natal chart - Sun in Cancer, Aquarius ascendant, Gemini moon. Was she into astrology or just following a vogue? A note on a scrap of paper - "rose hip syrup" - did she use herbal remedies? There was even her social security card 000-46-0000. What does the middle number 46 represent? It is the same number on my card too. My thots wandered to the complexity of Karma and how people's lives touch, tho they come from such diverse origins. How intricate the timing to put a certain person in position to meet another. This attempt to locate the family in those fotos was a project of my own curiosity and had I not been there to undertake it everything would most likely have been discarded and lost forever. The mysterious workings of fate had saved these few personal items from being spread to the winds as the rest of the contents of those drums had been. So, what had happened to separate these people from such valuable personal items as this portrayal of family history? Had they all gone together on some ill-fated flight? 22 June 1983 The Search Beginning with the most obvious leads, I sent letters of inquiry to the addresses on the drums and the most prominent New York address. Anticipating no response, I was preparing to write to addresses in Jamaica when I received a fone call on Friday June 24 from Marjorie. One of my letters had reached a relative who had called her. Alive and well in Hollywood Florida, she had lost her belongings when the company storing them went out of business a year ago. I told her that unfortunately, everything except the fotos and papers were put in the thrift shop or sent to Salvation Army. We arranged for her to come by my house on Saturday for the fotos. 25 June 1983 The Meeting With her came Adassa, Toni and Charm. Like the children in my own album, they had changed unrecognizably in four years and I confused Charm for Toni as she now looks like Toni did in 1976. Toni, now 15 is quite a bit larger and embarrassed by her baby picture in the nude. We all sat as if having a reunion, going thru the family fotos both hers and mine and talked of the lost belongings and what efforts might retrieve some ofr them. Then, in the midst of delighting over mementos that were saved, we realized that tomorrow is Marjorie's birthday and this moment a very timely gift.
