Photos from the Past

A picture from the past showed up in an FB message yesterday. The photo is of nine friends around a table on a summer night. Surprisingly, the clothing is not particularly dated but the hairstyles are. There is a camera in the foreground in addition to the one held by the photographer. In the eighties we carried cameras, not phones. And, apparently we drank Heineken.

When I first saw this message I didn't look at the forensic evidence, however. I looked at the people, the faces, the gestures. How the individuals communicated wordlessly with one another did not escape the lens. The date stamp said 1989 but I knew that was wrong. I wasn't seeing her anymore in 1989 and they would have been divorced by then. Suddenly I was in 1984. Had to be 1984 or earlier. The date stamp was wrong.

Could this picture be a view into the past, our lives before 1984, or a prediction of the future, shedding light on the years beyond 1984? Or is it simply a snapshot of one summer night in Gloucester, the people in the photo having fun at a moment in time when they know but ignore their pasts, don't know, and don't care about their futures? Today, in 2024, the folks in the picture minus one, sadly, know the future they couldn't have begun to predict or care about when that picture was taken forty years ago. Today, the people depicted in this photo, treasure the future gone past that had only just begun in Gloucester in 1984 with the advent of this photo. Just thinking out loud in the year 2024.