In a Facebook group, I had an interesting experience. One of the group members shared a vintage photograph of the Ellsworth Air Force Base commissary checkout lines on payday. Military paydays were once a month in the late 1950s and lots of families were down to beans by the end of the month, the “too much month at the end of the money” syndrome. Commissary check-out lines were long because nearly everymom showed up for groceries. I was intrigued by the picture because my family lived at Ellsworth then.
I first looked closely at the picture to see if Mom was in the commissary photo. Since the commissary was where she shopped there was a better-than-zero possibility that Mom would have been shopping (she wasn’t). I didn’t find Mom, but my eye caught some handwriting on the photo and this handwriting looked like Dad’s. Wow. [insert big smiley face]
Handwriting on the shared Ellsworth commissary photo. That “E.A.F.B.” is iconic dad-handwriting.
Given that Dad was in charge of the photo lab at the time, and given that he did take photos for the base newspaper (my brother and I posed for a picture about the children’s books in the base library), there was a better-than-good chance of Dad having processed the photo.
In the Facebook group, I was pleased to see one of Dad’s work photos. At home, we have his pictures of the family and our travels. We have slides, prints, and a few home movies. I know the quality of Dad’s pictures, but I’d had no idea what sort of pictures he took on duty other than ID card pictures, photocopying documents (with a camera, which was how it was done before Xerox copying machines), aerial photos, and that one picture of me and my brother pretending to read books in the library. How else he spent his time behind a camera, I had no idea.
4×5-negative image of Dad on “the Putt-putt” (his scooter). He would note on the negative edges the camera settings. In my photo collection, I have many examples of Dad’s handwriting.
So, out of the blue, on Facebook, I had the happiness of seeing my Dad’s handwriting on a photo completely new to me. Family-wise, it’s like discovering an unknown Rembrandt.
Our first snowstorm of the year was in November. Our weather forecasters have <cough> promised snow for next Monday. With luck, the snow already here will have diminished. The snow was pretty at Christmas, but it is wearing out its welcome. We see no snowmen. Children are not outside making forts. I see no one sledding.
I needed a vacation. So, I virtually went to Nairobi courtesy, as always, of Google Maps and Street View. Why Nairobi? Not sure, but no snow may have been a draw.
Haile Selassie Roundabout, Nairobi, Kenya
What did I do on my vacation? First off, I merely ‘parachuted’ into the city from my satellite view and landed where I landed. It wasn’t the best part of town. What I learned from not-the-best-part-of-town is that tire sales are big in Nairobi, well, “tyres.” That British influence. As I virtually drove down the street where I landed, I saw billboards for tires and auto parts. Along a rundown street, most of the shops in the three- and four-story buildings advertised the “tyres.” Auto parts, too. And driving lessons. I presumed Nairobi didn’t have much mass transit.
I was wrong. Popping up out of one part of town and into another (in big cities, driving takes forever whether you’re in a real vehicle or a virtual vehicle) I landed in an area in which buses stopped the Googlemobile from proceeding. Or maybe that’s my interpretation. In any case, as we approached a clot of buses, large and small, my forward-arrow no longer worked. I went back up, not quite into the stratosphere.
Coming back down, I looked for the city center. Found it — nice place. Not a single “tyre” sign near the Nairobi Hilton. I tooled around for a while, but nice parts of town seem to look much the same around the world: high rises, shops, boulevards, high-end cars. I went out of town.
Oh. My. Gosh. The Ngong Hills! How did I not remember that the Ngong Hills are so close to the city? (for those not in the know, read Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen, or watch the movie of the same name with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford). “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” The cinematography for the movie is breathtaking, especially in a movie theater. Oh, to have had IMAX at the time. That would have been marvelous. I’ll probably have to make do with watching the VHS tape. I’ll get out the Ouija board and conjure up Thomas Edison to watch it with me.
Time has marched on since the envisioning of Blixen’s story on film, and now the Ngong Hills have wind turbines and a massive solar energy farm. Kikuyu is now a Nairobi suburb with its own massive plant nursery Magana Flowers. Other relatively local sights are the Nairobi National Park , the Maasai Lodge, and the Karen Blixen Museum. SafariNow, the company hosting the three previously-linked sites, has almost as many billboards and signs in Nairobi as do the tyre-sellers.
Among the other things I learned while virtually visiting Nairobi, are:
- English is spoken if all the billboards and shop signs I saw are anything to go by
- traffic runs on the left hand side of the road
- many, many people walk all around the city — no Fitbits needed here!
- women commonly wear dresses
- as happens around the world, poverty exists alongside wealth
And now, my vacation is at an end, and I get to sleep in my own bed.
Note: screenshot courtesy of Google Maps
Thus far, here on the edge of the American prairie, winter has been so wintery. Our snows began in November and this weekend, they continue.
This winter is reminding me of past winters although it has yet to reach the quality and quantity of the winter snows of 1980 in Munich, Germany. That year, the snow accumulated for months and it wasn’t until April that the main sidewalk through the Perlacher Forst housing area reappeared. The regular work of snowplows had created streetside mini-Alps mimicking the mountains in the distance. Children walked to school in the street because they were rarely equipped with crampons, ropes, and carabiners.
In this age of warmer winters, though, this winter feels old-fashioned. On the edge of the prairie where the latitude ‘enjoys’ the hot/cold changes along the boundary between Arctic chill from the north and puffs of steam from the Gulf of Mexico, this sustained cold is testing our resilience. We’re almost out of bread and milk at the store. [wink]
Luckily, for us photographers, the weather is picturesque. For that, I am grateful.
Streetlight on a foggy winter night.
Valerie Bonham 