on learning about (and from) other people's lives

Someone once asked me if I had a favorite yard sale/thrift store/estate sale find and I think I responded by saying that any number of favorites come to mind depending on the day, but all for very different reasons. Finding packs of old Polaroid film (and hoping against all odds that they'd still make images), is a very different kind of favorite find than the diamond ring I found in the bottom of a bag of wigs that I paid four dollar for, or paying twenty bucks for that big, old beautiful Frederick Weinberg lighted sculpture just sitting there on top of a pile of junk. And all these things represent different kinds of favorite when compared with others, more sentimental finds: The painting of the Boston Terrier Chris bought for me at a Goodwill on one of our first dates (I had named the dog in the painting Diana Tripod long before we found a real one that matched the painting), or the round blue suitcase from the 1960s that I bought as a travel suitcase for my other dog, Dorothy--a suitcase that is covered in stickers representing all the states she'd traveled to. 

But, really, my first of the favorite finds (and what I'd call my most important find to date) was found exactly nine years ago today when I paid two dollars for two boxes of old 35mm, 120, and 4x5 negatives.

Early today, I did my 64th interview for a new project focused, in part, on other people's memories and experiences with cooking and/or baking. After the interview proper ended, we talked a little bit about the ability (or privilege) to pursue (or, conversely, not to be able to pursue) projects about which one is really passionate. I've been lucky, in this respect. I loved the project that became my dissertation and, much later, my first book, and I love this new project. In all seriousness--it's what I go to bed thinking about and the first thing I think about when I wake up. And it's what I think/do for most of the day. And I'm grateful for this. I cannot imagine anything else I'd rather be thinking about, thinking with, or doing.

The box of negatives (the first of my favorite finds and what I'd consider to be my most important find to date) represented the work about which I was probably the. most. passionate. The negatives came to me (and I to them) at an in-between time--I'd just finished up my book manuscript and was in that place of not knowing what I'd do next. I remember feeling slightly panicked--what if there was nothing else I really wanted to do or say, nothing I really cared about as much as the dissertation and first book project? The thought of having to produce scholarship just to produce it made me feel sick. And scared. I remember telling myself that it was fine if I didn't find something right away, that odds were something else would come along about which I'd feel passionate, but I don't know that I really believed that.

I remember the whole of the spring and summer I spent with this collection. I remember sitting down at my scanner each day and saying aloud (to the scanner, to the negatives, and to the strangers depicted in them--most, if not all of them, deceased), "Okay, where are you taking me today? What do you want to show me about who you were? About what and who was important enough for you to save, to document in this way?"

And, of course, this purchase led to others, to so many others, many of which would serve as the basis of the scholarship (and much of that video-based): more negatives, still photos, home movies, scrapbooks, letters, travel diaries. I felt incredibly interested in what I was learning. I felt incredibly connected to (and, at times, consumed with and by) what I was making. I don't think I'd ever been (or, really, that I ever will be) as experimental, as alive with my learning or making as I was during that six or seven year stretch. And I felt especially honored to have and to know and to touch these things--to look after them, to care for them, to try to honor them, these traces strangers, the dead, had left behind. And part of me hates that I gave it up, that I changed course--and not even for a very good reason. Perhaps for the most cowardly reason of all.

But here I am now. Nine years ago today I began learning how involving it could be to learn about other people's lives via the visual-verbal traces they left behind and today I finished my 64th interview learning about other people's lives via their lived experiences with cooking and/or baking.

And this new project, like the last, came to me (and I to it) at another in-between time, or a just-in-time-time. As was the case after finishing my first book, I knew that I'd not likely continue doing what I'd been doing and was worried that I'd not find another project about which I'd feel passionate. One that I could not not imagine myself doing, something that I'd want to wake to do, that I'd want to go to sleep thinking about, one that I'd want to think about, to write (or compose) about pretty much all of the time.  

Insofar as I've spent the past six or seven years working with the dead, I can say that working with the living has a definite perk: the living often like to talk about Brussels sprouts.