Dark Time by Matthew Silverman

The 1960s were a dark time. For me. When I think of my experiences during that decade, it all seems completely dark, with occasional vivid memories flashing, like a light switch flicked on in a darkened room, and then switched off. The vision of what was seen while the light shined remains against the blackness.

Everything was very happy, they all tell me. Our house was as full as it would ever be. Four children, my cousin living with us made five, parents, my aunt who came to help three days a week, a nurse and handyman who came one or two days, dogs, cats, and neighborhood kids coming and going. I was part of that happy din, laughing and crying as life dictated.

I was somewhat sickly for the day. I went into the hospital three times for hernia operations before I was four. I only remember the last one—vaguely: getting Jell-O served in the hospital bed, the rectal thermometer, my mother sleeping in a cot set up in the room. I was not able to walk so there were crutches, but I was still small enough where anyone who needed me moved could pick me up easily enough.

When we sold the house thirty-odd years later, I found the contact sheets a professional photographer relative had taken of us then. My brothers still looking exactly alike, one in his school uniform and the other in a jacket a tie. My sister looking serious. A single picture of my cousin and several of my parents, not yet forty, in charge of this brood and traveling together for business, leaving us in the care of my aunts for weeks at a time. That was how things had to be and we did not complain. We were not a big family with a lot of extended branches; we were small and growing.

We even have a new dog, Topper, whom my brothers run through the yard in the contact sheets. My brothers and sister and I congregate at the back door, they dressed up and I in my pajamas that I stayed in the whole time I recovered from the operation. There is no posed picture of us on the landing, just us all doing something different at the same time. As we were. These pictures are all I have left of the dark time.

I took the contact sheets down to Manny’s in New Paltz to be mounted. I did not choose one or two to try to get developed or expanded but put all the contact sheets in one frame. Black and white images you have to peer at, like looking through a hole in a wall that you cannot see over.

* * *
Matthew Silverman is a writer and editor specializing in sports books. Spring 2008 brings three books on the New York Mets, with one splicing in memoirs by followers of the club and himself that was inspired by the Authentic Writing Workshop (100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die).