Our House Burning

Quick; take a photo

There’s an old photo in a family photo album at my parents’ house of a house in flames.

“June 29, 1940

Our house burning”

It’s written in pencil on black paper under a black and white photo of a large farmhouse on fire. One guy is walking toward the front near a tree, another guy is on a ladder, and a third is standing back seemingly waiting for instruction. Flames are pouring out of the windows, the glass is gone. There’s a haze of smoke near the second floor, the front porch is dark.

We make fun of ourselves for taking too many photos these days. Selfies, photos of food, photos of spills, photos of streets, and photos of everything we see. We don’t know what we are going to do with these photos, but we take them anyway. So people make fun of the people who instagram their car crash 15 seconds after they totaled the only car they’ve got or the people who take photos of tsunamis right before they hit. A video of a guy taking a photo on a beach moments before a wave crashes into him sending him flying.

“What an idiot.”

And maybe he was, and maybe we do take too many photos, and maybe it is stupid to take photos of the crumpled front end of one’s now useless SUV, but we aren’t alone. My old wisened ancestors back in the good old days of 1940 took a photo, or had someone take photo, of their house burning and then they saved it, and put it in a photo album to remember 85 years later.

We have this image of our ancestors being so wise and thoughtful, so serious and so unlike us. But it’s not really true, or not true in the way we think it’s true. Our ancestors were closer to death, they did risk more just by being alive, they did step up to some kinds of responsibility more readily than us, and they were also forced into respecting some from of authority. But they were also criminals, and irresponsible, and ducked out, and fled to the new world, and covered their own backs, and saved their own skin, and tried to forget about how they did it. They were also dumbasses from time to time.