The Paper From 1969

I stopped by my parent’s house a few days ago to drop my daughter off for a play date with my mother.   I had heard my father was doing one of his periodic basement clean outs when I talked to my mother the day before.   My father is a collector of things.   His collections tend to be interesting, valuable or just unusual.   The basement was always an interesting place to go as a child because it was filled with so many strange and unknown items.

As collectors go, my father is one of the most interesting people I know.  He dabbles in lots of things.  And when he dabbles, he dabbles well.  He’s great at taking things apart and fixing them, or coming up with a solution to a problem no one else would have though of.    It was always fun to see what he was doing in the basement, although I wasn’t always welcome.   I am sure it had absolutely nothing to do with me being a rambunctious, pester-some child.

For my whole life there was a dark room in the basement in the corner of the unfinished area.   When I was very young I have recollections of my father doing film developing in the room.   I remember the smells and the warning to not open the curtain while he was inside.   He took a lot of pictures and many of them ended up on the walls of our house.   There was one of my toes, a marble and a crayon that stayed up for years.

After a while though my father moved on to other hobby pursuits.   The dark room became a storage room.   It was crammed full of things and since it was dark to begin with, I never really knew what was in there.  I seem to remember beakers and other glassware in one corner and a small jar or mercury I was told to never, ever get near because if it spilled it would be all hell to clean up.

My father has decided to clean out the dark room now.   When I stopped by the other day to drop off my daughter he told me he had gotten to the bottom of one of the shelves to find the newspaper lining the bottom.   The date on the paper was 1969, the year before I was born.

I wonder what he’ll do with the little darkened room when he gets it all cleared out?

The Big Boy Update:  My son was playing a Lego video game today.  There was a little bar over the player’s head indicating how much health or life they had left.   My son said, “my guy’s running out of battery.”  He knows what the battery bar looks like for his iPad and his little character’s bar pretty much looked the same to him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My husband said he thought it wasn’t a good day for her vision.   When we say things like that it may well be our observations make us think it’s a bad day, but it’s no different in her world of vision than it is any other day.   It’s so hard for us to tell.   We did take a flash light and shined it into her right eye, which annoyed her to no end.   Dr. Trese said there is some research with bright lights to stimulate the retinal cells.   I don’t know if it was good or bad, but we do know she can see out of that eye and she can see light fairly strongly.    I sure wish we knew what she could see though.