Kaleidoscope

The old red family album is falling to pieces; pages empty, gaps and glue marks on the thick black paper.  Prints are dispersed around the house, the museum of our lives randomly curated and re-curated on the mantelpiece like the shuffling and muddling of memories.  Objects, photographs, articles and other mementos appear, sit together for a while and then disappear as we shake the kaleidoscope and the story’s emphasis shifts.  The clock stopped some time ago at half past two, but mantelpiece-time does not stand still.  It’s all snapshots and vignettes and fragments from up and down the decades. 

Something about middle age, something about the shock of sudden losses and the long process of grieving-in-advance, something about the thread of dementia that winds its way down the generations - something about all this compels me to set a narrative down, to fix the past, and the present too, before it all slips from my grasp forever, before I too forget. But each time I shake the kaleidoscope, a different picture forms.  

This is one of those pictures.

Designed and bound by Stanley James Press. Photos of finished book by Curtis James.