Shades of grey

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/07/2021 (1550 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whenever there’s a house fire or other emergency, those rushing to safety make sure they have three things: family members, pets and photo albums. Oh, occasionally you’ll hear about someone prioritizing their insurance documents, but they’re the kind of people who use words like prioritizing. We have discovered that, for all the logic we’ve brought to our careers, we would both rather grab the photo albums and trust that our insurance broker could give us a copy of the policy in a pinch. So how did a Boyens family photo album end up in the new Sscope Thrift Shop at the old Neechi Commons building on North Main?

● LAURIE: I was looking for lunch to take back to my office at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre when I saw cars in the parking lot. I thought the co-op grocery and restaurant might have reopened, and that bannock would be perfect on a rainy April day. That’s how I found myself standing in front of grocery shelves now full of hand-crocheted doilies, lamps with no shades, and atlases that predated Gorbachev’s redrawing of Europe. Among the detritus of other people’s lives was the most beautiful photo album I’ve ever seen: a bright red cover embossed to look like alligator, bound with a matching silk cord and an extravagant tassel.

I’ve seen plenty of photo albums in thrift shops before, but only once before did I find one that wasn’t empty. I flipped through the first pages, looking at the young blond girl in the black-and white-photos from the 1960s, and found myself thinking that someone had to know who she was. But how would you ever find her without a name? And then suddenly I had one. Tucked into the inside back cover was a certificate for Hans Boyens. Could he be related to Ingeborg Boyens, the journalist?

I Googled “Hans Boyens” and hit on his obituary within seconds. Ingeborg was his only daughter. I Googled her name and found her on the Writers Union of Canada website. The profile said she was the author of two books, and a former producer of Country Canada, and — best of all — it listed her email address. The store charged me $1 for the album, and I tucked it under my sweater to protect it from the rain as I ran back to my car.

I don’t remember where I picked up lunch that day, but I remember vividly how I felt before I emailed Ingeborg. I was elated at the thought of helping someone recover the traces of her past, but I also knew I was risking rejection, as we do every time we reach out to a stranger.

What if she’d just digitized the photos during a Marie Kondo-inspired purge of her possessions, and didn’t want the originals trailing her for the rest of her life? Or what if Ingeborg’s childhood wasn’t as happy as it seemed in the photos? Someone had ripped photos out of the last half of the album, the white shredded backs still stuck in place. Could these memories have been jettisoned intentionally? What ultimately made me press “send” was how similar the photos were to the ones my own parents took in the ’60s. The little girl in those photos could have been me, and I would want them back.

● INGEBORG: That afternoon, my inbox was full of the usual marketing emails. But there was one that made me pause. From the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. A post-lockdown notice they were going back to live theatre? No, don’t be silly, I told myself. Probably just a pitch for a donation.

But it was a personal message from someone I didn’t know — Laurie Lam, producer. I had no idea what a theatre producer was, but I had been a television producer for decades. Same job title. Had to be a good person. She wrote “I just came across a family photo album in a store and thought it might be connected to your family because of the certificate at the back.… If you didn’t mean to discard this album, I’d be happy to return it to you.” She had attached a couple of pictures of a familiar red photo album, the certificate of my father’s graduation from the Canadian Public Health Association, and a page of family photos. I was shocked. What was my life doing in a thrift shop?

I was sure the red photo album was one of my family’s collectibles from an earlier time. Black pages of heavy paper protected by a page of transparent paper. A silk tassel to mark the page. The corners of the pictures tucked into tiny, black anchors glued to the page. The photos themselves would be of stern-faced people posing correctly for the camera.

I assumed it was the precious keepsake purchased and assembled by my grandparents in Germany to give to my parents as they readied themselves and their infant daughter for a cross-Atlantic voyage to Canada. This was not casual travelling; it was 1957 and my parents hoped to emigrate to Canada as part of the postwar immigration surge.

My parents are both gone now, but memories of their youth, their optimism, their love for me and for each other came flooding back as I looked at those attachments. I thanked Laurie, gave her my mailing address in Woodlands and offered to compensate her for postage, but she graciously declined. In an April 12 email, she explained: “I‘m so touched by your family’s story, and really honoured to play a part in it.… It is kind of you to offer to reimburse me but I hope you will accept the album’s return as a gift. Solving book mysteries is one of my most feverish pursuits, and so I’m really in heaven over this whole affair.” Later, she sent me a photo of herself as a two-year-old, standing in a snowy Selkirk yard holding out a book, and I thought how our earliest impulses often echo through our lives.

The gift from a stranger arrived neatly wrapped in brown paper. The spaces in the box filled with organic Styrofoam peanuts (a woman of my own predilections). The album began with many more pictures than I remember of me as a toddler and then as a youngster taken at a series of Elmwood homes. I had no pictures like these, no such documentation of our early lives. There was a three-year-old me sternly training a cat; I think it was Kaetzchen (Kitty), who was also an immigrant, albeit from the outdoors. Lots of images of me in my “full-Winnipeg,” actually enjoying the snow. Christmas pictures of me cuddling a doll and of me ironing with a pint-sized iron at a toy board.

Who was this girl? Was I ever that domestic?

I can remember the camera that produced these crisp, square images in my father’s hands — a little leather bellows would pop out when he was ready to focus. There was one large black-and-white family photo taken by a commercial photographer — my father young, but already bald, my mother, who was very self-conscious about her refugee teeth, had somehow been coaxed to smile, and seven- or eight-year-old me, happy and confident in my homemade clothes. This was clearly a picture designed to make the rounds across the ocean to say ‘We’re OK.’

The album is a 50-year-old reminder of a past I had all but forgotten. I have no children so I suppose it will mean little to anyone else. It was a treat to look back at a personal past, but the album did present a few mysteries. This was album No. II. Was there a No. I covering those early years? And anything beyond 1963? Why were the pages in the second half of the album ripped and marred as if someone had savagely torn photos out with no regard to sentiment?

● LAURIE: I promised Ingeborg I would go back to the store the following week to look for more albums but, as the province’s COVID-19 numbers began to rise, I felt increasingly uncomfortable about returning. Manitobans were all being asked to prioritize safety, so was my search really necessary? Of course not. Still, I kept imagining more intrepid shoppers buying the other albums, and tearing out more photos, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her history being lost.

By the time I worked up the courage to return, the protocols at the store had tightened: staff signed me in and took my temperature. I went straight to the shelf where I found the first album, but there was nothing there, so I sought out the manager. I told her my story and asked if she could point out any other places in the store where I might find photo albums.

She was eager to join the treasure hunt and took me to a shelf in another part of the store, where she lifted a pile of albums off the top, well above my eyeline. My heart raced as I saw the distinctive labels on three of the albums, with the handwritten Roman numerals. Two were empty but the third was filled with colour photos of what seemed to be trips to Germany, and casual pictures of a sprawling family. I recognized images of Ingeborg as a young woman now, and was relieved to see that no photos had been torn out.

I bought all three for a dollar each, in case Ingeborg wanted to see the empty albums as well, then emailed to ask if we could talk about my latest shopping trip. That afternoon, we spoke on the phone for the first time, and heard the excitement in each other’s voices. You can tell a lot about someone from their emails, but emails are planned and edited, whereas phone calls are improvised humanity.

I remember her gratitude and amazement, which I tried to deflect by explaining that my job required me to find homes for objects all the time. During my long career at the RMTC, I safeguarded many bits of the world’s theatrical past. I told her I’ve sent a George Bernard Shaw letter to a museum in Texas, a photo of Sir John Martin-Harvey as Petruchio to an Australian archive, and a handbill for Alberta Hunter’s legendary run at the Cookery to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Of course, the only reason I had these artifacts in the first place is that the public generously donated hundreds, if not thousands, of items to the theatre during my tenure. We are responsible to each other, it seems to me, for the disposition of everything in the world. We talk sometimes about the 3 Rs of waste management (reduce, reuse and recycle) but it seems to me that we could add a fourth R for repatriate: send things back to the place where they belong.

● INGEBORG: I was humbled by Laurie’s determination and generosity. And so impressed with her writing that I proposed we work on a piece together. I didn’t know that she was a writer herself, but her emails were smart and often funny. Writers are notorious loners, but I somehow felt comfortable trying something new with her.

Her second package offered up a more modern album in a more conventional plasticized style. It documented a past that was much more familiar to me. We had hardly been a profligate family; throughout my teens every penny was saved for trips overseas. We flew with Wardair at a time when you dressed up to travel and midair meals were served on china. On the years when we didn’t go to Germany, relatives would come to visit. My grandparents, who had thought they would never see us again when they packed us off by ship in 1957, became old hands at transatlantic flights.

These photos were taken with one of those little 110 point-and-shoot cameras that were the rage before cellphones. You could see a slightly obstinate cast to my chin as I grew older. I was going through the rebellion common to most teenagers, but perhaps especially immigrant kids. It wasn’t easy straddling the Atlantic, living in two countries.

My mother was looking frail in those pictures because of the lupus that was ravaging her organs. She died in 1987 at the age of 57. Halfway through album No. III.

My life carried on, in what might have been album IV. My husband Gregg and I moved across the country to work as political assistants, journalists, writers and finally back to Winnipeg, where I took on a job as a documentary TV producer and Gregg started up a book publishing company. I was too busy and too forward-looking to wonder what happened to the photos of my youth.

A few years after my mother died, my father remarried. When he and his new wife, Helga, moved into a new house, he cleaned out the Crescentwood bungalow of my youth. Perhaps looking forward rather than back, he set the photo albums that were supposed to mirror a long life with my mother on a peripatetic path to Sscope Thrift. Or perhaps after he died seven years ago, the woman who became his widow finally chucked the albums that celebrated another woman’s child. Or perhaps when Helga’s health declined and her sons were saddled with the chaotic job of clearing the house, they were too stressed to fuss about some photo albums.

The mystery of what happened to those lost and found again records of my past may once have consumed me, but is of little matter to me now. A long life and a year-and-a half of COVID-19 have taught me to simply accept the unexpected.

The albums have come back to me at a time when the progression of my multiple sclerosis has widened my perspective on my life. Who I am now is a direct result of who I was then, and the people who loved and shaped me. Seeing them again is like being given back a life I didn’t even know I’d lost.

• • •

Two months after Laurie found that first photo album, the COVID-19 restrictions loosened so an in-person meeting was finally possible, at a shaded picnic table in Steve Juba Park. Ingeborg said she’d be the one with a walker, and Laurie said she’d be the one with the ridiculously wide sun hat. To say we were giddy about meeting would be an understatement. We felt like horses who’ve been kept in separate stalls, whinnying and snorting to each other for weeks, before finally being let out into the pasture to run together.

We laughed and talked for over an hour, about the albums of course, and about writing this story. But most of all, we talked about something Laurie’s husband had asked her: is this story really about the albums or is it about the albums bringing together two strangers, who discover all they have in common?

Ingeborg had contributed to her husband’s three-volume Manitoba 125 publication, which played a pivotal role in the development of an award-winning play Laurie produced about Manitoba’s history. We both write, neither of us has children, we’ve each been with our partners for 38 years, and we both moved as children to communities where we felt like outsiders.

Yet there was a deeper bond that the albums awakened in us. The most unlikely of chances had plunged us both back into the past. There, in black and white, we found again the little girls in each of us, and how their early promise keeps unfolding to make us the women we have become today.

Ingeborg Boyens is a journalist, author and editor who has contributed to magazines and newspapers across the country. She was the managing editor of the Manitoba Encyclopedia, which was released by Great Plains Publications.

Laurie Lam was the producer of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre for 25 years until her recent retirement. She is a writer, educator, script analyst and bookseller. She also helped proof-read Sir James George Frazer’s 12-volume The Golden Bough for Project Gutenberg.