Somewhere in Time

Last week the boys and I took what I'm calling my "Valley Nostalgia Tour 2010." After lunch with three lovely ladies whom I used to work with (back in the day when I used an alarm clock and didn't wear the same pair of pants two days in a row), we stopped off at the church where Brendan and I were married (and where I went to school until age nine) and my childhood home, which I hadn't seen in...well, I honestly don't remember. Well over a decade. Not only did I want to take a walk down the proverbial Memory Lane, I was intent upon attempting a photo assignment.

I recently discovered a group on Flickr called Looking Into the Past. Here's the link, if you're interested: www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast.

The gist is this: you take a old picture to the exact spot where it was originally taken, hold it up in front of your camera, line everything up the best you can, and take a picture showing the old photo and current location combined into one trippy view. Some people actually morph their pictures using Photoshop, but I think the coolest pictures are the ones where you actually see the picture held up to the camera by the photographer.

I made my first attempt at this technique at the church, which, sadly, has seen better days. I recently discovered that it's closing its doors after over 60 years. But a new church is coming in, one that sounds like it could either be a church or a rehab facility. Not that there's anything wrong with either churches or rehab facilities. Anyway, a lot of the landmarks that were there when we got married (trees, shrubs, even some walls) were gone. But after several tries, I did manage to get this:


Of all the pictures I took, this one lines up the best (note the doors in the background). I also like it because it has Evan's stroller off to the side. The original photo is one of my favorite prints from our wedding. It was taken about a minute (maybe less) after we exited the church and was--as you could guess--not posed. It makes me happy.

Here's another picture from out in front of the church. I couldn't line up anything here since someone decided to mow down all the trees. But at least it's the same spot:

Our next stop was the house where I spent my early childhood. Wow. I couldn't believe how much had changed, but yet, at the same time, being there felt the same way it did when I was a kid. I've come to the conclusion that there's a particularly unique feeling you get when you revisit a location known intimately to you as a child. When you perceive a place only through the filter of young eyes, the impression is a strange mix of reality and fantasy, and although it may look different (most often, smaller) as an adult, it feels so heavy with the weight of your past. I don't know if that made sense, but it's hard to even put this particular sensation into words. I'm sure the French have a simple, elegant word that means what I'm hopelessly trying to convey. Or the Germans. But their word probably has seventeen syllables. And it's capitalized.

So, this is a picture of my childhood home in the 1970s:


Here it is now:


And here's my attempt at creating a worm hole in the middle of the San Fernando Valley:


I like this one because if you look really closely at the old picture, there's a goofy old stroller. I'll take my mom's word for it that I'm in that stroller, next to our dog, Molly. I also like it because a very out-of-focus Nathan is sauntering off to the right side:


While the Spanish style of the house is painfully out-of-place considering the surrounding ranch-style homes, I was happy to see that the old homestead looked good. In fact, the entire cul-de-sac looked nice, which was a relief, since you never know what you're going to get in the Valley after 25 years. We took a short walk around the corner, and I was, however, tickled to see that the house we dubbed "Junkman Jack's House" when I was a kid still earns that moniker. Here's Nathan heading down the street I roamed 31,378 times when I was a little girl. I guess Memory Lane does exist, after all: