End-of-Year Story: The Big Picture

Life is all about timing, perspective, attitude, and luck. And windows. Best wishes for 2025.

The Big Picture

I wonder: if a thousand words is what a picture is worth, what’s a memory worth? A million words? Gazillion? Let’s get started then.

Last July on the afternoon of my birthday, while gathered with family in Montana, someone in Portland strode into a bank and cashed a check forged with my signature. The check came from a checkbook of mine this individual helped himself to in my top dresser drawer. It was made out to someone named Henry Hill, Jr. in the amount of $190.

This is odd, but true. I have a copy of the check.

Odd because the fraud occurred on my birthday. I mean, what are the odds?

Odder still, the name on the check, Henry Hill, Jr., is the main character in Good Fellas, a terrific flick and one of my favorite mobster films.

I wonder: was that his real name, this degenerate who downsized us? Doubt it. Probably a stage name. It made me mad and laugh at the same time. I did not laugh, though, at my forged signature on the check. I cringed. It had some terrible swirls and looked like the writing of a deranged person. Or someone who’d just learned cursive. A fake.

This cat mobster, Henry Hill, broke in through a basement window and took some time to rifle through our belongings both upstairs and down. Nothing odd there. Heists happen every day. Yawn.

I wonder: did Henry take my gym bag first? It’s missing so I presume so. That’s how I would have done it. Get a bag to carry the spoils.

He took loot by the numbers — checkbooks, deposit slips, passports, plus cash squirreled away in a round cookie tin for rainy days and break-ins. Only tiny crumbs remain. Again, nothing odd here. People rob each other all the time, for all kinds of reasons, all denominations. The items, mostly, are replaceable.

But that night at some point, Henry spotted three wooden cigar boxes. Maybe he grabbed them without looking inside to see what they contained. Or maybe he flicked back the gold clasp of one box, opened the lid, spied what was inside and in a flash chose to take it all. For whatever reason, the boxes and their contents went in the gym bag.

Inside the cigar boxes were rows of slides, hundreds, organized with cardboard dividers noted by year and event. Images of loved ones, relatives, friends, beloved pets, birthday parties, holidays, far-flung trips. Memories captured on 35mm film.

This character Henry made off with these pictures. Pictures of strangers. Why? What did he want with a few hundred slides from someone else’s life? Maybe it was the cigar boxes that lit his fancy. Vintage, ornate design. Took me years to find them. Did he have a collection of cigars to store? Or pictures of his own to sequester in the boxes and replace mine? This seems odd to me.

I wonder: what did he do with the slides? Throw them in a dumpster? Or in a fire and watch them curl and turn color? Did he hold each one up to the sun, or a light bulb, to see what other lives are like?

I wonder: could he own a slide projector? Shows the slides on a wall somewhere? Following our family through the past — Nebraska to Montana, Utah, Oregon, Mexico, Guatemala, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Rome, Cairo, Ras Tanura? Retracing our past and replacing his? This seems odd to me.

In my film, Henry Hill sits in a room, smoking a Swisher Sweet. He sets the cigarillo down, takes the cigar boxes out of my gym bag, pulls out some slides. He holds them up to a bare bulb and squints closely. He sees strange people in odd places (is that a camel?). People laughing at things unknown. He ponders, what are they laughing at? I ponder as well, what were we laughing at? I can’t remember. But laughing is replaceable.

Meanwhile, our slide projector, Vivitar, sits silent, pouting in a box under a table that needs dusting downstairs — waiting to be plugged in, turned on, wondering when the show will start.

Viv doesn’t know time has advanced. Doesn’t know that pictures are still being taken, but the phone is the projector now, a zoom-in high-speed slide show on a screen you hold in the heart of your hand.

Gone are the days of drawing yawns with slides of your trip to Europe and the Pyramids displayed on a white sheet in the living room (Cool camels, huh? Wanna see more?).

There are things worse than losing a few memories on film. Today, a college friend responded to a holiday message I sent: “Yes, life is good. I’m too healthy for a liver transplant. I’m dealing with that. Bigger problem is the belly button hernia that they won’t remove due to being too close to liver. Worried that any infection may reach liver which would not be good. Thanks for asking.”

I’ll take being broken into, sorry. Numbers and valuables and odds and ends are replaceable and you can snap a thousand pictures a minute. Memories are replaceable, too. You can transplant new ones.

Get the picture? The show must go on.