the first snow around the great lakes reminded me of these two photographs. my grandfather took these pictures of his sons with a kodak brownie camera most likely in the winter of 1948 on the streets of ripley, new york. the top image shows my uncle buster pulling my dad (left) and my uncle george (right) on a sled, while the bottom shows buster zipping down a street on a sled that i am pretty sure my dad still has.
wintertime always reminds me of my uncle buster. most of the season i wear a white rayon scarf that was his, my grandma called it an "opera scarf" when she saw me wearing it in the early 1990's. she told me that uncle buster was a sharp dresser and my style reminded her of him. i haven't found any pictures of buster as a teenager, but i think he looks pretty stylish for an eight year old, which was about how old he was in these photographs.
i never met my uncle buster. he died july of 1955 in lake erie, off moose beach around westfield, new york, at the age of fifteen. he was there with his girlfriend and her family, and they said one minute he was floating in an inner tube on the lake and the next minute they looked up he was gone. lake erie has some pretty wicked currents, and it was a while before they found his body. the cause of death was drowning, but my dad feels that it was a hemorrhage of some sort as uncle buster was a good swimmer, and there was blood around his eyes, nose, and ears.
talking to my dad about buster's death can be emotionally leveling. when i was recently asking about the uncle i never met i really understood how huge the loss was for him. "it was a dark summer," he said. "no matter how much the sun shined, it just wasn't that bright."
when i look at these two photographs i usually don't think about buster's death, i am just happy to have found them several years ago in a box of old family photographs. while rifling through the cache of pictures, i immediately paused when i saw the one of buster sledding down the street. in that picture, he and i look alarmingly alike. i flipped it over to find out who the boy was and the back was blank, as were all of the pictures in the box. that discovery triggered a whole day of mining my dad's memory so that the pictures in the box wouldn't one day become "instant ancestors" for someone else. i imagine the same scenario will happen one day when olen, my son, fires up my old mac and finds the thousands of images that i have never properly named.
