After Thanksgiving dessert we’d rearrange the living room. As the artwork was taken down from the big white northern wall, all the couches and chairs were turned towards it. My father would set up a stand towards the back with two slide projectors, one above the other on separate shelves. All of a sudden a beautiful white light would shine forth through the darkness, and my father would adjust its position until the light covered the entire wall, floor to ceiling, side to side. There was so much excitement and anticipation right then. The slide show was about to begin.
Slide shows were an important ritual of my youth and I still vividly remember the details. The rich, vintage colors of 35mm film. The slow dissolve between images as the slide show moved from the top carousel to the bottom and back again. And of course the beam of light traveling through space, cone-shaped with distinct edges, illuminating the particles of dust dancing in the air. Whenever anyone passed in front of the projector their shadow would show larger than life on the wall, while the contours of their body were wrapped with the slide show’s current image.
And then there were the sounds. The gentle, ever-present whirr of the projector fans. The click that came with each change of slide as it was lifted up, the carousel advanced and the next slide dropped down before the light. The rhythm of the click was slow, at intervals of five or six seconds, but also precise and unwavering. There was the music too, and for this my mother was in charge. Time and again she played Spyro Gyra on the stereo. In my mind it’s the official soundtrack of our slide shows, and every time I hear it I’m immediately transported back to our darkened living room. Spro Gyra’s 1970s jazz fusion so perfectly captured the time and place, not just of the photographic stories of our lives being told on the wall, but also of the slide show evenings themselves.
My father was a professional photographer when I was young and he had a passion for slide shows. These were stunning, well-edited documents of family moments from the past. Each photo told a story. They were slice of life, candid and straightforward, not posed. Collectively they transported me to a special inner place where I relived my youngest days. We all sat in the room together, connected, while at the same time I had an intensely personal, emotional experience of nostalgia and love.
There I was on the wall, a younger version of myself, dressed in the style of yesteryear. Everyone was. The collars were big and wide, and people seemed to dress up more back then. The furniture in our living room was different. The couches have since been upgraded, and the orange rug is long gone. The house was painted purple when we first moved in and now it’s a creamy white. I see myself sitting with my brother on the concrete stoop that’s no longer there after Mom and Dad spent a summer building our new front porch.
Of course everybody in the slide show was younger, and oftentimes we saw people that were no longer with us. Maybe they passed away, maybe they moved across the country. Either way, they were no longer part of our daily lives. As we watched we remembered their presence, we felt it.
Sometimes the slide shows were of normal days at home, but mostly they were of special occasions like birthday parties and family trips, only some of which I can recall from memory. I have no memories of my second birthday, but in my mind I can easily access slide show images of me playing on the PVC playground my parents constructed in our attic apartment. I can see my grandfather being ordained a deacon in an ornate ceremony that I wasn’t at. I see Mike and I at the old wooden playground in Delaware Park. My parents’ trip to Portugal. Sara’s preschool graduation. The night before Katie was born.
Amazingly, I can never feel the hardship when I’m looking back on those days. Whatever exhaustion or stress people were feeling when the photos were snapped has left virtually no trace in the images. What does come through is the joy of life, the importance of the moments we spend together. As the slide show marches on we deeply miss those moments of our lives as we reconnect with them.
This was my life, the path I took towards where I am today. These are the people who were with me at the milestone moments of my youth. These are the people who knew what I was like when I was a boy, before the heaviness of life set in. I was a happy boy, and I was excited for the days to come, to get older, to discover what life had in store for me.
The slide shows always felt familiar and otherworldly at the same time. Sitting in a room with family and friends, surrounded by many of the same people whose former selves were projected on the wall. I was in the here and now just as I was thrust back into the past. There was no place I’d rather be, but where was I? I was in the living room of course, but my mind and spirit were also elsewhere.
I wish I could go back to one of those slide show evenings. Before cell phones, before the internet, when a slide show was the night’s main event.
Writing this now, I see a clear picture in my mind’s eye of the darkened room, the beam of light, the togetherness. I can still feel deep in my bones what it felt like to watch slide shows way back then.