Timm, Six Years Gone

This is the six-year anniversary post for Timm. Six years! His memory comes back like the blooming tabebouias of spring, yet with each passing year the intensity of that color slowly fades.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine him here. A lot of world has passed by since we last saw him. Even this memorial seems now dated, with only annual postings for the past few years.  Will this be the last?

When I think about it so much more could have been said about Timm, so much more of his work brought forth. The pictures from his archives provide such a partial account, the photographer behind them usually hidden from sight. 

I keep thinking that some day one of his friends will come forth with more of his story.

But time moves on. There are fresh things to love, to grieve.  New cats to feed, different TV shows to watch, another season of aches and worries to add to the rest. 

Yesterday Mom and Molly and I had lunch at the memorial garden of Greenwood Cemetary in Orlando where there's a tabebouia tree planted in Timm's memory and a small stone with his name. As usual we sat on the nearby memorial benches erected for Nicholas (Molly's stepson) and Jamie, who both died in the same car accident along with a friend in 2007. The day cloudy and flecked with rain, reminding me a bit of Salem after he died. Spring heavy still with winter. A long time ago but not, I said, but Molly put it better: both yesterday and forever.

Selfie of Mom, Molly and David

 

 *  *  *

Last year I posted a number of Timm’s pictures that had yet to be aired in the blog. For this sixth anniversary of Timm’s passing I share a selection of images that sister Molly recently scanned from my mother’s slide archives.

Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s Mom took family pictures with a Pentax manual camera. It was such a far cry from the ultramegapixel cameras of the present, wedged into the backs of smartphones! Focus and depth of field were arbitrarily decided, based on film speed and the given light of a day.  

Mom would perch behind that camera and wait for the shot to appear; patience was one of her great parental virtues. But it was love that made her wait for love to show up in the viewfinder. (Dad would take his turn, too, with the camera, though his concern seemed more with herding us cats into the frame and STAYING STILL for just one second.)

It any wonder that Timm would become such an avid hunter of images with his camera, believing as he did that “beauty heals?”  Or that brother Will would later take up the work with equal passion and talent and dedication, seeking what he would call “the stillness within a frame”?

The Slide Trove was added to as us kids were growing up, and on certain nights we’d hang a sheet on the wall or use a screen and project images from a slide projector. Picture Night was a ritual way of seeing who we were, and it was good experience, since the view was mostly through Mom’s loving eyes.

In later years prints were made from a number of the slides, and it is those prints that were scanned and uploaded for this project. The slides languished in storage often exposed to the Florida heat.

At some point  few years ago Molly was in the slide archives and notice how they were degrading. That’s when she decided to undertake scanning in most of them—nearly 1,500 shots. For Christmas this year she gave us all a set of DVDs with the images.

Now we can each have Picture Night whenever we choose to from our laptops and PCs.  It’s no quite the same as when we all gathered together with soda and popcorn and cheered and jeered the images of our projected family history, but it’s what remains.

Here, then, are some shots including Timm from the Trove. Thanks again to Molly for the determined effort to save the images themselves from oblivion.

Finally, I close with this poem about Timm that was originally posted here in September 2008. I think it still holds a great deal of Timm’s essence.

TINY GASPS OF WONDER

Brother, I wander to your memorial
on this soft spring day where breezes
strum the fine mouths of flowers
atop waving garden stalks —
and wonder if the heart’s grief
descends a sacred way,
shedding the dross of history
until only the finest memories remain,
flowering from the richest loam.

We all love that photo of you
standing at the Lincoln Park Zoo
in Chicago at age 5, a hand to
your gaping mouth, eyes wide with
wonder at some beast,
recognizing the whole story there,
home at last.

That picture of you is the sum
of all the photographs you’d take
pouring back the healing waters
of a womb you would not forsake
even though you feared it so.

Perhaps we are at last
but epitaphs writ on an
ancient chamber’s stone
a thousand lives ago,
tiny spirals of a child’s pure Yes
repeated in the dark’s vast No

become such flowers,
blossoms of eternal light,
tiny gasps of wonder, 
one fleeting, vast delight.

August 2008