How I Came Upon the Travel Diaries

2006, April, Eastertime. My paternal grandmother had passed away earlier that year, following my grandfather by several years. Catherine Anne Huber Bowen was born in Rochester, New York, her hometown where she’d frequented German-speaking delis as a child, grown up and found love and raised a family, attended countless concerts, luncheons, French lessons and bridge games. My grandparents’ house, soon to be put on the market and sold to a new family who would begin building their own memories and history within it, was full of their belongings: antique furniture, rugs, dining services, books, musical scores and librettos, vintage memorabilia and knick-knacks, newspaper clippings and photos accumulated over many years of occupying, living, loving. 

I drove from Maryland with my dad and two youngest offspring to attend the memorial service which brought together the extended family in addition to old family friends and acquaintances who had not seen each other in years, dare I say decades. The service, where loved ones shared their fond memories of my grandmother, was followed by a meal at one of her favorite restaurants, multiple generations sharing in good food and conversation and toasting to her memory. Attendees gradually began to feel a sense of closure, allowing them to take their leave of this moment and set back on the road towards their respective cities and homes, towards their futures. Some close relatives lingered a bit longer back at her house, gathering a few of the things that brought back the most vivid memories of their time with my grandparents. A piece of sheet music, a tea set, a cocktail glass, a set of carved wooden animals, an antique tool. 

Soon all had left but my dad, my kids and me. Dad and I had just two days to go through, as it were, everything in the house, determining what would be preserved (for perhaps some unknown purpose) and what would remain to be cleared out by the company that had been hired to do just that. It was quite fun, enjoyable even at first as we cradled belongings in our hands, turned them over and shared stories, mulling over how the objects had been acquired, on which trip to which foreign land. We opened drawers, discovered nooks and crannies, pulled boxes down from high, hard-to-reach shelves in the backs of bedroom closets. We marveled at the photos, paged through my grandmother’s books in French, my grandfather’s books in Spanish, smiled at articles clipped from newspapers scores of years prior, with comments and musings jotted down by my grandmother in her recognizable, scribbly yet practiced handwriting, the crosses of the Ts always floating slightly above the rest of the letters. We discovered a few things which brought back painful loss, others which filled the heart with the bittersweet warmth of nostalgia at the memory they evoked.

Decisions had to be made and we determined that the Band-aids in the medicine chest purchased in 1972 which would no longer adhere to anything and the distinctive bottle of Campho-Phenique whose oily label was barely legible could now finally be discarded. The 10-year old cans of Ensure in the kitchen cupboard which had been used to nourish my grandfather in his final year met the same fate. We gathered things we would keep and cherish, notes and letters, one written by my great-grandmother to her husband, saying that Catherine had met a young man who would make a suitable husband in spite of the fact that he was rather skinny. Another from my grandmother to my then two-year-old Uncle David from the hospital where she had given birth to my dad, saying that they would be home soon and that he would finally meet his new brother Johnny. There were many touching moments, memories triggered and thoughtful words shared. 

THE BASEMENT

We finally ventured down into the basement. As the afternoon of that second day wore on, our mood turned a shade darker. The amount of stuff was daunting. We were discouraged as we realized that there were not only shelves filled with expired canned goods and the proverbial left-over, dried-up paint cans, but also layer upon layer of things that had built up, stratas of sediment distinguishing each decade as it passed into the next. In some areas, an attempt had been made to carefully arrange things, in other corners objects appeared to have been tossed on top of more objects, stowed away rather than carted to the dump years earlier where they could have been deposited and would now have plants, indeed trees growing out of the soil created by their decomposition. 

Some of the discoveries, as we began to dig in, were nevertheless fascinating, helping to lift our spirits. My grandmother's, or it could have been my great-grandmother's dinner service was stored away in a large box – cream-colored Chinaware decorated with gold rims and patterns, thought to be given to the young couple upon their marriage. We came upon my late Uncle David's dentistry equipment from the 1960s – a small cabinet with doors and tiny drawers containing the tools and minuscule materials used in dentistry at the time. After leaving the airforce, he had been accepted in 1959 by the Buffalo School of Dental Medicine and subsequently set up an island-hopping dental practice in the Caribbean based in Barbados, flying to and fro in a Beech C-45H. 

Some precious family photographs had been tossed in the general direction of one of the piles and when we turned over the water-damaged specimens we discovered the faces of my grandfather and his seven siblings as children. Black and white studio photos with the grey soft-fade vignette so distinctive of photos of the early 20th Century, encircling the young faces. We were able to salvage some of them, bringing them back up to the surface where things of bygone days were no longer forgotten.

Amidst the rubble were hand-held dumbbells which hadn't been lifted by anyone in years (except perhaps to move them out of the way for the addition of another layer of soon-to-be debris), antique farm tools which hadn't made the cut to be amongst those on the wall display, old magazines, ring-toss games whose originally playful, bouncy rubber had hardened, becoming brittle and flaky, boxes of unused canning jars and lids, old radios… Countless objects had found their way to this cavern where the act of placing them there ingrained them in the memories of their owners rendering their continued physical existence unnecessary and forgotten.

An old slide carousel sat on a rickety small table, still loaded with the slides that must have been displayed on an unfurled screen set up in the living-room at the last family slide-show decades prior. Behind it, on the shelf-lined wall at the right end of the room, were some photo albums and multiple boxes of photos still waiting to be sorted and placed in their own album, unaware that this sublime way of displaying one’s meanders through life and distant lands would sadly become obsolete and lost to a digitized world.

Inside smaller boxes labeled with places and dates were more of the many slides my grandparents took to document their trips. Next to these were small notebooks, my grandmother’s travel diaries, some standing in a row in chronological order, some stacked up, not yet categorized, others tipped over, spilling off of the shelf onto the floor, perhaps knocked off at some point during a rousing game of ring-toss or when someone climbed up to get some now forgotten item on a higher shelf or to change a light bulb. I randomly picked up a few and put them back on a shelf. As I placed two or three dusty notebooks back into some kind of order I looked at the rest still strewn about and felt it was hopeless. 

Our energy was flagging, our enthusiasm for discovering old stuff fading. The emotional impact of saying goodbye to our beloved mother and grandmother had perhaps given us an initial burst of curiosity and starry-eyed eagerness to sift through the memories. But the backlash of that unpaced energy surge had now long since settled in and the never-ending micro-decision making process of “what do we keep” out of all of someone else's accumulated affairs, engulfed us in exhaustion.

In addition to the mental and emotional fatigue which increasingly weighed on us, the sorting, moving, lifting, removing, repacking of so many possessions was taking a toll on our tired bodies. It was now three o'clock in the morning on our last day there and our original self-important feeling of being responsible for ensuring the preservation of the family memories had gradually been replaced by a touch of resentment, by mostly unspoken questions like “Couldn't you clean up your own mess? How many years had it been since you went through the stuff in your basement?” We realized we couldn't really finish the job in any real sense and that at some point we would just have to stop and leave behind whatever we could not get to. Our time was limited, we just lived too far away, and we had our lives and families to get back to. We would have to give in to the semi-complete process of closure imposed by the circumstances whether we wanted to or not. Bleary-eyed, we decided to call it a day and head off to bed to get a little rest before our drive the next day to my parents’ home in Maryland.

We packed up the car the next morning with the treasured items we had decided to bring with us on our journey. We went around the house for a final look to be sure that nothing that was left struck us in the light of day as something we could not abandon and must be added to the already fully packed car. I ventured one last time into the basement which didn't seem quite so ominous now that we were a bit rested. I was again drawn over to the shelves of photos, slides and journals, probably because I had always been fascinated and in awe as a child of my grandparents' travels to far away places. I just couldn't leave it all behind. I knew I wouldn’t be able to take it all, there was just too much, a floor to ceiling shelf-full. Some of it was in poor condition, wrinkled, dirty and dusty. I took what I could carry of the items which had suffered the least damage and found room for them in the car. I took them back home with me and kept them stored away until some undetermined moment. You have them now before your eyes.