My First Slide Conversions

Right after my mom died...that summer of my discontent II. The first summer of my discontent was the summer after my father died in 1967. Why did my parents have to die in the spring? Isn't spring supposed to be a time of renewal? I guess for me it was. I had to reinvent myself twice in those springs--first as fatherless and then as an orphan. Enough pathos. Although my father died too young for him and for me, I had wonderful years with my mother. Not every day or even every year. Some years were tough. But, you know, I really loved my parents. I thought they were the most elegant beautiful and interesting people on earth. I don't often admit it but they were more interesting to hang out with than my contemporaries which I suppose is why I was a lonely kid. While other kids, teenagers, were hanging out, going to movies, going to the Village to see the beatniks, I was at PJ Clarke's with my parents listening to them talk art, politics, and news. Oh yes, and my father, usually drank himself into a state where he was very funny and very drunk. Then the talk might turn to how my father wanted to get out from under his father's thumb. Well, he did. He committed suicide at 45. My mother said it was "for the best." Literally, she said that in the moments after the doctors pronounced that he was dead. Of course he was dead; he was lying unattended on the bedroom floor for like 12 hours. I had heard him scream in pain at 1 am but I didn't want to wake my mother up. She was sleeping in another room. She didn't go into the bedroom until 2pm when she found him. No one told me he was dead but I figured it out pretty quickly. No one said suicide, but when my mother died, I found the note among her things. That's one of the reasons that I've decided to keep nothing...I always suspected suicide and was glad to have confirmation, but really, it was hard to read. I was mad at mother and father, both of them, for not thinking about what I needed which was a mother and sober father.

Water over the dam. Which leads me back to the original purpose of this post, right after my mother died I decided to have some slides scanned for posterity. Most of them are of my China trip and the rest are just an assortment of stuff -- some duplications of subsequent scans. The first couple of hundred though are of my trip to China with my mother in 1985. That was a fabulous time.