My sister called this morning to let me know my father is in the hospital having his appendix removed today, so our Thanksgiving plans are out the window. Cross your fingers for my pop, will you?

Six years ago, Jen invited me down to the County to attend the Oyster Festival with her family. I underestimated the travel time and arrived late (not a good first impression) but attempted to make up for it by trying raw oysters for the first time to impress both Jen and her mother ( I still don’t know if I was successful, but we’re married, at least.)

Saturday we took Jen’s father for his first time, and while we didn’t get him to try the oysters, we did enjoy some St. Mary’s stuffed ham, funnel cake, and Sam Adams Octoberfest on a warm, sunny autumn day. What could be better?

I took Jen to Jordan’s last night for a birthday dinner, after breakfast in bed, a day’s worth of flowers, and the promise (yesterday was a work day, after all) of a relaxing soak in a mineral bath with fresh lilies and scentless candles. Thursday night is live jazz night, so we were entertained by a guitar/bass combo who put a silky touch on jazz standards and Hendrix alike—it sounds strange, but believe me, it was perfect. The food was fantastic, and the ambiance was just right. We returned home to four birthday messages on our machine, a bottle of red wine, and more fresh flowers.

Happy birthday, baby. I love you.

I’m writing from New York State, where I’m winding down from this year’s golf outing and keg party, organized annually by my 90-year-old grandfather. The day turned out to be perfect, with 80° weather and a cool breeze blowing off the lake. I hauled my clubs out of the basement, brushed the sawdust and cobwebs off my bag, and proceeded to shoot a lousy game of golf, punctuated with infrequent moments of competence. Luckily, my family plays somewhat regularly, and between my father and sister’s drives and my mother’s putting, we didn’t embarass ourselves too badly.

After lunch and the prize announcements, we hit my uncle’s house on the lake for a continuance of partying (which, at this stage, means watching my cousins’ children run around in water wings while sipping beer, eating chips, and catching up with family) and a lazy afternoon boat ride on the lake. After eating dinner, we retired to my parents’ front porch where I proceeded to pass out for an hour with my feet on the railing as the sun fell below the horizon.

I took a bunch of pictures, which I’ll probably post tomorrow, and got a pretty decent farmer’s tan, which will be gone in three days. But right now, I’d like to strangle the drunk guy singing Rolling Stones covers at the lawn party down the street so I can go to sleep.

Reporting from Atlanta, we have witnessed the successful graduation of the fourth Lockard child, from Georgia Tech. Among the way, we have encountered fickle Georgia weather, unreliable public transportation (Note: the Georgia Dome has an abnormally small parking lot—be warned) a restaurant called Maggiano’s, where food is delivered not on plates but in shipping-container sized portions, and a little too much red wine. Now the process of shuttling people back to the airport begins.

From a best-guess estimate, I’ve got about 800 photos scanned from my grandfather’s archive. This includes some (but, tantalizingly, not all) of the oldest family photos in his posession. The total haul is about 5.11GB of data. Some of those are dupes- I did the highest-resolution scans I could of the most important and rarest photos in the collection, which means that Thomas, my great-great grandfather, is preserved in ones and zeroes at 1200dpi for the long-term future.

I’ve got about eight hours of videotape of my grandfather reviewing his collection, some with and some without my father helping to draw stories out of him. He seemed to want to get to the latest photos immediately, and we had to explain to him several times that we were more interested in his earlier history, the stuff nobody knows about. Once he warmed up, he was rattling off the names of people who had us stumped. It was interesting to see where his memory was sketchy, though—the names of dogs, for example: On the farm, they had a long succession of barn animals with names like Soupy, Shnooky, and Pumpkin. It seemed like he identified every dog from every decade as “Judy”, an interchangeable and unknown (to me) mutt who died before my time.

Based on my experience, I have a few recommendations for anybody tackling this project in the future:

• Bring a scanner and scan everything and anything you can. Scan the fronts and the backs of the photos-often times there’s better stuff on the back than on the front.
• Have someone helping you draw the stories out of your relative. If a memory pops up about a particular photo (and you’ll see it on their face when it does) ask them about the place, time, people who were there, and how it made them feel. You’ll be amazed at what they remember, and that will lead you to more questions.
• Your relative may start out slow, but once you engage them, it’s amazing how much they look forward to the process. My grandfather is 90, and I think he was thrilled to have us talking to him about his history.
• Block out a lot of time. I had five days, and they went by quickly. Between filming four hours a day and scanning at night, I was exhausted at the end of each day.

On the way out of town, I stopped back in and showed him my photos of all the work done on the house since we moved in—something to make the housepainter in his blood proud. He peered into the LCD of my laptop as I took him through the rooms, asked questions about the work I’d done—clucking when I mentioned repairing plaster, and shaking his head at the hallway cieling—and nodded approvingly when I was done.

I’ve always felt that I never spent enough time with my grandparents. Because we were geographically the second-furthest grandkids from their house, visits in the summer and for holidays were usually quick and over before they’d started. Because I’m a weird half-social misanthrope, I have a difficult time keeping relationships strong and fresh, often letting the time between contact with important people in my life stretch on far too long. As a result, I always felt like an outsider at family gatherings, like the kid who stood at the back of the school dance and watched everyone else have a good time.

This visit changed that for the better, I think—not only because I recorded some of our family’s history, but because I began to change the way I see my family. Seeing my relatives in their younger years somehow made me feel closer to each of them, like I was watching over them as they grew up and formed families of their own. Instead of feeling like an outsider, I felt like I was more of a part of their lives, even if they were frozen in time on a piece of paper, especially as my grandfather rattled off names and told me which house they stood in front of and whose wedding they were attending. One of the resolutions I made for this year was to be a better son, husband, and friend in my relationships, and I made this trip the kickoff of that promise to my family. Spending time with my father and his father (and the rest of my family, between scanning pictures, ha-ha) meant a lot to me, and I think it meant a lot to each of them. More importantly, it wasn’t that hard to do. The hard part is in the follow-up, and that’s an ongoing process that’s going to take a lot of discipline, something I don’t have a lot of.

As I was leaving, I noticed the wind had blown the trail of my footprints in the snow away, as if I’d never been there at all. I’m glad I got the time to spend with my grandfather, and that he got to know me a little bit better; My next project is going to be collating the photos I have with the information I’ve got and try to put something together for him to share with his family—and to be there when he does.

Yesterday we got two solid hours of Grampy’s time on tape. He went to mass in the morning, so we got about a half-hour in before lunch and another half-hour afterwards, making our way through the envelope marked “the 60’s”. I left so that he could take his nap and returned to the house with a pile of photos to scan, most of which I got done. We headed back up at 3:30 to continue with both envelopes from the 70’s, and as a bonus, we got about fifteen minutes of Grampy talking to my Dad about his parents and grandparents.

I’m heading back over today to talk about the balance of the photos, which consist mainly of the 80’s and anything else we didn’t get to. I’m going to try to power through that relatively quickly, and then get back to just talking with Grampy about anything pre-1950 I can think of while the tape is rolling. Then, one more evening of scanning, and we’ll call this expedition done.

Fuck, I missed Lost last night. What happened?