July 26, 2012 – A View From The Middle (Class)

Sometimes I wonder if the things you do during a typical day are happenstance, or if it all fits together as some part of a mysterious master plan.

Take Wednesday, for instance. My lovely wife and I had to go to the bank where our home mortgage is to sign some paperwork in the early afternoon in order to keep our interest-only payment plan going so we can try and stay in our home a while longer while I continue to look for a job that provides at least a halfway decent income. We got into an interesting conversation with the branch manager at the bank who we’ve dealt with on a very friendly basis for years about other people needing to do the same thing because of similar circumstances, and how there are so many other banks out there who wouldn’t even think of doing such a thing for people who are unemployed — they’d just say, “Sorry, you need to pay it all just like always or you’ll have to foreclose. We can’t help you.”

You see, there are businesses out there who are willing to work with people who are going through a run of challenging times in order to keep their lives as close to “normal” as possible. If it weren’t for this bank being so willing to work with us for months now, we would have possibly ended up out of our home before now.

You really have to search and ask questions to find businesses like that, though. It can still be a rough world out there.

The reason why, in this case, I wonder if the things you do during a typical day are happenstance or if it all fits together as some part of a mysterious master plan is because of what I happened to be doing earlier Wednesday morning as part of a project I needed to work on. It involved searching for some older photos — the kind printed on paper from a now-foreign material (in this digital age) known as 35mm film that goes through a thing called darkroom processing — and I wasn’t really planning on doing it that morning, but I was under a bit of a time crunch and it needed to be done quickly.

A lot of these photos are kept in a plastic storage bin, and they’re not organized at all. Someday, that will make for an even bigger project. I had to go quickly through what’s kept in that bin, find ones that fit a particular theme and sort them out, through hundreds of pictures that go back even to my bachelor days when I used to coach Little League football in Idaho.

I am a bit of a photography buff. This bin contains a treasure trove of photographs and memories.

Most of the photos were taken after I got married and we had children and we moved to Utah smack dab in the middle of 1995 — a move that was made because I was changing careers, I was fresh out of college after setting the world on fire in an intense two-year applied tech program, and I found a good entry-level job that would help me to support my family in reasonable comfort because I would be making more money than I’d ever made before.

We moved into an apartment at first. I found a photo of us with our two boys — ages 4 and 2 at the time — sitting on our couch in that apartment, our sons dressed in their Sabbath best after spending the morning at church. I found countless family photos — mostly of the wife and kids — at the home that we’ve lived in since late March of 1996, making those payments every month, the first and only home we’ve ever worked on making our own. I found images of our daughter, still in the womb and after she was born, taken in this comfortable home.

I could go through those photos and find memories of birthday parties with the kids’ friends on our deck and in our kitchen, both before and after our home went through some major remodeling in 2002 with a new kitchen and a new music and art studio added on to the west end of the house to help support my wife’s business, even finding photos of the kids playing in a big dirt pile on our front driveway that was left there as part of another back yard improvement project around the same time as the addition.

There were all kinds of photos in that bin, enough to cover an old coffee table of ours in the studio and have piles stacked fairly high. So many of them focused on our home that we’ve lived in for over 16 years, where our children have spent so many of their growing years into young adulthood and early teens, where my wife and I have gone through those times with the “morning walks and bedroom talks,” and we’ve loved each other more as time has gone by. There were photos of the countless varieties of animal friends who’ve lived here, and my lovely wife can remember the names of each and every one of them. I went quickly through so many of those photos, it was like having years of my life literally flashing before my eyes.

And then, it was all done — just shortly before having to go to the bank to sign some documents so we can continue to fight to keep this house where so many memories live. I think of what it would be like to possibly lose it, and it makes my heart feel like it’s about to break.

All because of a storage bin containing hundreds of photographs and memories from a family that’s had to survive through times like these before, and now has to survive through times like these again.

That’s why I keep reassuring my lovely wife that she married a “survivor.” I told her that back in 1993 before changing careers. I’ll tell her that again today as I search for whatever career path is still out there in front of me.

I still wonder if the things you do during a typical day are happenstance or if it all fits together as some part of a mysterious master plan.

NOTE: You can click on the photo below to enlarge it and get a better view of the individual photos contained in the montage by navigating up and down as well as right to left.