First Stop

07/11/11 in the middle of the night, or the early morning I guess we would call it.  John D McIntyre Jr. passed from this world.  I don't know where my father passed on to that morning, where his spirit voyaged off to.  But I know that, during his too-short life on this floating spinning sphere, he loved his life.  And he loved taking photos.  From his first camera (whatever that was, I really have no idea) old, fully-manual, Cannon that ended up taking a dip in West Lake, Hanoi with Andrew in 1996 to the fancy-ass Nikons that he spent way too much money on, he loved his cameras and camera-related paraphernalia.  He mounted his photos in his house, showed them to whoever would sit still long enough to look at them (from visiting girlfriends to captive elementary schoolchildren), and even displayed them at a local community college just before he died.  But after his passing, I ended up with his computer, his scanner, and his collections (both digital and hard-copy) of his photos.  For more than a year I've subconsciously avoided looking at them.  Well, that's obviously not what he would have wanted.  He wouldn't have wanted them to gather dust (or whatever neglected digital images gather).  They need to be shared.  Few will probably happen upon them here, but I hope they'll at least have some kind of life, something slightly more than cold storage on a serial progression of hard drives over the next decade.  Obscurity is preferable to obliteration.

 This, clearly, is not one of dad's photos.  I have no idea who took it, but it's one of my favorite pics of dad in his childhood.  This is from his fifth birthday in 1950.  I like his outfit, his big McIntyre ears, and the grin on his face.  Something in the mouth and eyes remind me of my own son.  More than anything, I wish he'd been able to meet his grandson.  The newly minted McIntyre boy.  Sometimes life f-ing sucks.

 

Egyptian girl in front of a grave.  Can anyone read the inscriptions?  In my mind it reads:  "Here lies a nice calm place to sit and live life."

More of dad's photos to come.