A Lost Moment In Time

By Craig: The other day I was sifting through some old boxes looking for a certain document when I happened to stumble upon an old photo album that I had made when I was about ten years old. A lot of the photographs have become dislodged from the corners that they had been set into. However, overall, the photographs were in pretty decent shape considering the rough condition of the album. Some of them had been bent and tossed around. In fact, when I removed the album from the box a few of the photographs came tumbling out as if they were telling me "okay! okay! we have had enough! It has been 30 years since someone has looked at us! As I flipped through the fragile cardboard pages one of the photographs caught my attention. It was a photo taken by my father with my old Kodak camera back in 1978. The image was taken at summer camp in Gardner Massachusetts. I can remember the day well. It was a rainy day and a fairly miserable one at that. It was one of those days where the sky couldn't make up it's mind whether to clear up and dry everyone off with a blazing sunshine, or keep drowning us with vicious cloudbursts! Finally, it decided to drown us, but for some oddball reason none of really cared...We were having too much fun.

 

 

The photograph is hazy. The image is blurred. The human figures small and faceless, their identities eradicated by time. Only the bell bottomed trousers and the period cars give it a hint as to the time and era that this grainy image was captured. Disco was the craze. Jimmy Carter was the U.S. President. The New York Yankees with the late Thurman Munson behind the plate were three months away from winning another World Series, and weeks away from Bucky Dent's five minutes of fame. Does anyone remember Buck Dent?

 

  Only one of the tiny figures can be identified. A boy wearing a blue scout uniform and a yellow jacket can be seen near the middle of the photograph. His blazing wavy red hair standing on top of his head like an Olympic torch. He has broken into a run! He is on a mission. He is racing! He wants to win! He is me!  I forget the particulars. It was some sort of relay race. I was running toward a table to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Did I run back? Did I tag someone? I probably tagged my brother and he raced to the table and spread the jelly on the sandwich. Did anyone eat the sandwich? Did we win? It is strange how memories of events in ones past are only fragmented. Perhaps this is why we take photographs...to jog our pathetic memory banks. In the background there can be seen five other human figures. They all seem to be interested in the boy in the yellow rain jacket running at top speed toward something undefinable...something hazy...something blurred. That would be their recollection if somehow they could be identified and asked "What were you doing here?" There were hundreds of people at camp on that long ago day. Besides myself, does anyone else remember it? Would I remember that day if I did not have the photograph to refresh my memory? Over a third of a century has passed since the skinny boy in the yellow jacket raced toward a date with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He is still running today....He will continue to run...and run....and run...from the specter of time until, one day...he will run no more.