Procrastination

I fully intended to get my piece written before 10 p,m. on Sunday night for our 9:30 a.m. Personal History Writers' Group on Monday morning. Grandma Baker always said "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and every week I have the best of intentions not to be up all night writing. But once again this week, I sat down in front of my computer at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday. At least this week I was armed with a topic and some ideas to develop. No sweat. I'll whip this thing out in no time.

The topic was the fun my sister, Kathie, and I had with friends for about four summers of our teen years at a Lake Erie "resort" called Gem Beach. The word "resort" is used loosely here, very loosely. Gem Beach was a community of beach cottages with amenities such as a dance hall, penny arcade, skating rink, and marina located on Catawba Island east of Port Clinton, Ohio, by maybe twenty miles. It was neither new nor fancy, but it was surely a great place to have fun. After our having spent all of our growing up vacations fishing in Canada, going to the beach for a week was like dying and going to heaven for teenage girls. Lots of sun, sand, and of course, boys.

I launched into my first paragraph, the topic sentence of which had been rolling around in my mind for a few weeks. Hmmmm. Didn't jump off the page like I had expected. A little flat, to say the least. No worries, I'll come up with something else as I spew the rest of the fun onto the computer screen.

Second paragraph. The old player piano that sat on the front jalousied porch -- we had some of the most fun with three or more of us squeezed onto the rickety piano bench, clinging tightly to the piano as we pumped the pedals and sang "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" and other old songs at the top of our lungs. As I started to write about the player piano, the names of a few of the old songs came back to me -- Walkin' My Baby Back Home, It Had to be You, Singin' in the Rain, and our all time favorite, The Ben Hur Chariot Race -- but there had been a whole closetful of piano rolls. What were the other songs we sang? Not that that was important to what I was writing, but it really bugged me that I couldn't think of more. So I automatically reached for my cell phone to call the other half of my collective memory, my sister Kathie, who lives two time zones to the east.

"Kathie, I'm writing my thing for tomorrow and I need your help. It's on Gem Beach and I'm trying to think of some of the other songs we played on the player piano. Which ones do you remember?"

Fortunately, she really is the other half of my brain, and the ones she came up with were totally different than the ones that I had thought of: Yes, We Have No Bananas, Red Wing, Carolina in the Morning, Bye Bye Blackbird. Great! Maybe a little brainstorming might help here with the rest of this story.

"Remember the year all the guys from school came up? That was your senior year."

"No it was my junior year because my senior year everyone had jobs."

"Kathie, I'm sure it was the year you graduated. That was the year that all the kids from Waite High School came up, too."

"Pam, the guys came up two years."

"Gee, Kathie, I don't remember that. They only rented that cottage down the road your senior year."

And so the conversation continued until we were both very confused about what happened when. Not that it was important, but golly, you think you'll never forget something so important and here you are many years later a little confused. A lot confused.

Suddenly I remembered a photo album -- the kind that has black pages and the photos are affixed by black photo corners -- buried in a box somewhere in the basement that had mostly the pictures of our Gem Beach adventures. Brilliant! That would solve the mystery. Carrying Kathie with me on the cell phone as I dug in the bowels of our storage shelves for the right box, I found the album. It was in the first box I opened.

I marveled that I had been so doggone smart to put these specific photos into an album, labeled with people's names and the dates of our weeks of vacation there, when I had been a mere babe and had no clue that many years down the road I would need this information. Feeling pretty smug gave way to humility when I realized my older sister had remembered the sequence of events those summers better than I had. I described the pictures to her and we chuckled together at some of the memories. I wished she could be browsing the album with me.

Almost an hour after our conversation began, it ended with me sitting at the computer, a paragraph and a half written. Heck, it was only 8 PM, I would scan a few of these pictures and email them to her. If I hurried, she could see them yet tonight -- remembering the two hour time difference. I was only going to scan a few of the better ones, but then I thought as long as I was scanning a few, I really ought to do them all in order.

Out came the pictures one by one, and placed on the scanner, scanned, cropped, adjusted, named and saved. There weren't really that many, maybe 35 or 36, but each step took a few minutes. And of course I got alittle off track when I remembered specifically two pictures taken at Gem Beach that weren't in the album. Hmmmm. Where were they?

Now you have to understand that I am a "family history packrat". I have filing cabinets full of "stuff" about our family -- birth and death certificates of long dead grandparents, aunts and uncles; locks of hair tied in faded ribbon; funeral record books, old drivers' licenses; pedigreee charts and family group sheets; cemetery maps and plot numbers; old letters; newspaper clippings, and oh, so much more. And then there are the pictures. I have a bookcase filled with photo albums. I have thousands more pictures in shoeboxes in chronological order (some of them anyway) that haven't yet gotten into albums. And I have other boxes of our older family photos. That may make it sound like I should be able to put my hands on any picture because I'm so organized. I'm not organized. It just sounds like it.

Fortunately, once again I lucked out and went right to a photo-organizer box that I had bought at Costco a year or so ago and within about 10 minutes I had found the two pictures I had been looking for, along with one that would make good blackmail material against Kathie. Well, not really. We didn't do anything that was that bad. But it was a photo of her wrestling with a guy that used to hang out at our house -- presumably because he liked our Mom, but really because he had a secret crush on Kathie. Anyway, they really were just horsing around.

Laughing, I quickly redialed Kathie to tell her about my "find". I asked her tauntingly if she wanted me to post the incriminating snapshot to our MyFamily.com website so she could see it or if she'd rather that I email it to her privately. A wicked-sister snicker erupted from my throat. She opted for the email. What else could she do? Her reputation was at stake.

I scanned, cropped, adjusted, named and saved the photo. Then emailed it to her with glee and a few more chuckles.

While I waited for her to call me back in hysteria, I continued to scan the Gem Beach pictures.
It was now after 9 PM. My story for Monday was hanging on the page at one and a half paragraphs. Bad paragraphs. Ones that most certainly had to be rewritten, fleshed out, plumped up and added to. Twenty minutes went by. No call back. Did she go to bed? Was she mad at me? Nah, she's never mad at me. But why didn't she call? Well, I'd just keep scanning until I heard from her. Ten more minutes. Finally the phone rang.

"Pam, aren't you going to send me that picture?"

"Kathie, I did. Didn't you get it?"

"No, it's not here."

"Uh-oh. I bet I sent it to the wrong email address."

"You better not have!"

"No, I didn't send it to anyone else, but I bet I mis-typed your email address."

I went to my email and sure enough, the email and infamous picture had bounced back to me. I re-sent. Ten minutes later, Kathie called again.

"Pam, that's not me. You can't see my face. It's not me!"

"Kathie, I remember taking that picture, and it is you!"

After a brief discussion, the "other half of my collective memory" dismissed me. It was not her, she insisted, and even if it was, she did not believe it because she didn't remember it and could not see her own face in the picture. Period. Discussion over. We laughed and called it a night. Past her bedtime for sure, and certainly creeping up on mine.

The first batch of Gem Beach pictures was scanned and saved to electronic media for our posterity. Not that they will care too much about the fun we had many years ago with people they will never know. Those two short paragraphs are still hanging on an otherwise blank page. The story that goes with the pictures is still floating around inside my head from which it has yet to escape in any meaningful way. I had nothing to read in our Writers' Group this morning. Maybe I can start now for next week's meeting...

Nah, it's too early.