Sunday Dinner

We used to have sit-down family dinners on Sunday evenings. There were tablecloths and napkin rings and those things that nobody knows what they're used for anymore: the wedding presents, the keepsakes, the souvenirs from our ancestors who would never see a drive-thru window.

Sunday dinner was a ritual wrapped in many layers of tradition.

A necessary precursor to the meal was the Telling of the Shopping. Almost like an appetizer, every meal began with a discussion how that evening's entree had been acquired. Meat, fish, or fowl, the adults would whet their appetites by discussing where the meat had been purchased, how much it had cost, and what, if any, negotiations had transpired with the butcher. This retelling was followed by general agreement that you just couldn't get good cuts of meat anymore.

The next step was to review how the meal had been prepared. What was the oven temperature and how long it had been cooked. This was a generation before "Top Chef" or the Food Network, but these technical details were considered with the same weight given to matters of state.

Interspersed in the conversation were maxims about cooking. I have never roasted anything in my entire adult life, but I know that everything cooks at 250 degrees.

Once the food had been fully considered (I hesitate to use the word "digested"), conversation moved on to the wine. Sunday dinners always had wine and, like the entrée, the variety, price and point of purchase were all studied. I never had the sense of my parents as wine connoisseurs. Like the glass rests for the carving knife and fork, wine seemed more like an embellishment, like mint sauce, or parsley. They never talked about "bouquet" or "flavor notes", but always about price. For many years, there was a standing challenge to see how many bottles could be purchased for a total of five dollars. (In those days it was often more than two.)

Those rituals dispensed with, the conversation among the adults--and there were frequents guests at these gatherings--was a time for stories. The subjects were pretty mundane, but the stories were very elaborate and often very funny.

The table was where we learned about the history of our family. Stories about meat shopping quickly became stories about other meals in other places with cousins removed both in geography and genealogy.

This is where we kids learned about a mysterious faraway place called Glencoe and the farm where my grandfather was born. It was where we learned about my father's work and the many characters of his acquaintance.  I use the word "character" on purpose because it seemed as though he never used given names. It was never Mr. This or Mrs. That, it was "Napoleon," "The Merganser" and "The Boys from Ottawa."

Normally, once the meal was complete, the adults would retire to the living room and we kids would go in search of the nearest television. On rare occasions, however, the slides would be called for.

Nobody takes slides anymore. They are a relic of the days before cable, a time when people documented the events of their lives--birthdays, trips, graduations, their gardens, their thumbs--with a picture and then set up the screen in the living room and showed these precious moments to friends and family.

I have always preferred the medium of the slide over traditional prints because they seem more magical. Quite apart from all of the equipment needed to appreciate them properly, the slides themselves are transformed by the act of projecting them.  Prints are collected in albums and scrapbooks or sent through the mail, but slides almost by definition are part of an oral tradition. They are intended to be shared in a group and while every picture tells a story, every slide requires an interpreter.

It was a very theatrical undertaking to lug the projector and screen out of the basement and get it all set up and adjusted. My dad really had no interest in that part of it and so I quickly became the family projectionist. (From there it was a short slippery slope to becoming a full-on AV nerd in school.) And when the curtain was drawn across the bay window and the lights were turned out, then you had a show.

Like many of the accessories on the dining room table, the equipment and indeed the content of the show were passed down from my grandfather's house. There were no avid photographers in our house and so the photographic record of my childhood starts off well, but over time, there is a gradual loss of interest. My grandfather, by comparison, was a documentarian. When he died there were more than 1500 slides in his collection and they all found their way to our house.

Many of the slides were in trays and had handwritten notes on stiff narrow paper that were sort of wedged between the borders of the slides. The overall effect was to make each tray look like a case for something like a conductor's baton with a very thin handle. Over time--days really--these labels would pop out and if you weren't paying attention they could easily become separated from their associated tray. And even if you could keep them together, it was not always easy to decipher my grandfather's handwriting.

The trays themselves were problematic, because they had no mechanism for securing their contents. As I was to learn more than once, it was never wise to rush when putting together one of these impromptu Sunday shows. One false move and there could be slides everywhere.

But on the screen these slides are rich in both color and history.

The vivid Kodachrome color accentuates the other-ness of these images. They are from a time when men wore a sports jacket to go hunting and a 3-piece suit to go on motoring tours.

The historical richness is like what happens when you visit an battlefield monument or an historic house: part comes from the tour guide and part comes from your own imagination. It was in these slides that I saw the only pictures of my grandmother standing.  She was bed-ridden from before I was born until the day she died, but in these larger than life images, she is standing and travelling and living a life I can only imagine.

Showing my grandfather's slides meant hearing the stories evoked by each series of images. These stories had the quality of legend because unlike what happened over lunch on Friday, these stories had been burnished in the retelling. Sometimes the stories were about the image on the screen, but often they would be about something else entirely.

Each year it gets harder to independently verify these stories. At the time of their telling, I did not pay close enough attention and now there are fewer and fewer people left to ask.

When my father died and his household was being dismantled, I was very clear about what I wanted. There are things I would have liked to have had, but I had to have these slides.

It sounds strange to be so attached to so many pictures of people I don't know and places I have never been, to the unflattering portraits of so many stern-looking Scots, but, like the stories they begat, my connection to them is about something else entirely.

Since they have come into my possession, I have not always been their most disciplined steward. Individual slides have been removed for a card here and a Christmas present there, always with the intention of putting them right back and not disturbing the order. Never seems to work out as neatly as that. I always mean to do a better and more comprehensive job of cataloging and organizing, but they never quite get finished. What does happen, I have noticed, is I become fascinated again with the images and the faces they contain and the stories that are happening to them at the moment the shutter clicked.

In the same way that the images serve as a kind of bookmark for their photographers, they connect me to my family and help me find my place at the table.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director