I recognized that smirk
August 20th
In my quest of doing nothing too exhausting this weekend, I went for a morning walk. Just as I was starting, my aunt called me asking for some computer help. Since she lives nearby, I made a short detour to see what is going on and help. And as an aside — is it really a detour if I was just walking aimlessly in some undefined direction? But that is a question for some other time. At least now my walk had some purpose to it.
As it happened, my aunt had some problems with downloading and then forwarding photos to other members of the family. Easy to solve and afterward we started talking about those photos. It was another bunch of old family photos sent from a niece of a cousin of an aunt of some other aunt. She found them in an old album and was sharing them with the others.
Among them, it was the photo above, and I immediately recognized some people there. Standing third from the right is my grandfather, standing second from the right is my grandmother, and first from the right is my grandfather’s mom — my great-grandmother. Crouching first from the right is my great aunt — my grandfather’s sister, and the girl in the middle in the sailor dress is my aunt that I was visiting. Nice piece of family history to put in a genealogy photo album.
The photo was shared with some other people in the family right away, and immediately there was a quite animated discussion, with some phone calls being exchanged as to the identity of the other people in the photo — the main question was if the woman standing first from the left is a first or second wife of the tall guy embracing her — the guy being my great uncle. But that was no longer of interest to me.
My grandfather was. I knew him growing up, and he was always a good and fine grandpa for me and my siblings. On the other hand, I know that he made life a living hell for my grandmother and my mom, and her sister. Basically, he was a war veteran (The Second World War), wounded in action, arrested by both the Nazis and the Soviets, ran away from the law for years after the war for his anti-communist views, and was a funny guy who loved children and animals and was a violent alcoholic as well.
But that will be yet another subject to write about….
What struck me about this photo of my grandfather, was his smirk and the way he held his head — downwards and to the left. That is the EXACT way my brother keeps his head! And his facial features in this photo are as well very close to what my brother looks like now. But something else still bothered me about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I pulled out some of my photos from when I was in my twenties/thirties. Yep, there it was. That is me as well, I do the same exact thing that my grandfather did, and I see now in my brother. Chin downwards and to a little to the left, a slight smirk and eyes looking ahead. That is the unconscious way I keep my head as my grandfather had before.
Again — there is a continuity in me and in my gestures and behavior passed on from previous generations. Good thing is that now I can see the bad things my ancestors did and NOT continue them myself. Other stuff comes genetically or behaviorally without my conscious thoughts and only gets noticed on seeing old photos. And lets the alcoholism and violence and crime and infidelities that were endemic to my family stay only as a memory brought out in the old photographs.
