My grandmother dug through the furniture and who knows where else she keeps it all, but she produced three albums and four boxes of photos tonight. I started her down this path by asking about a CD someone brought over several years ago that traced my grandfather’s family back to his grandfather through photographs.

It was essentially half an hour of people I didn’t know, mysterious black-and-white shots of people my grandmother knew as adults and then the later, questionable, hair and clothing styles of those later adults.

So we watched the disc and she named people and guessed at others. And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the back of the house. I was staring at pictures of my grandparents looking into a camera two decades younger than I am now. My wife was taking pictures of me from three decades ago. Suddenly we all felt so young, and so old. And it was all interesting and weird, except to see those that are gone, now, and to count them all up in your head.

I want to hear these stories and one day I want to ask a lot of questions about them, for posterity’s sake. Some of that information should continue on, somewhere, but I’m not sure if there’s much of an appetite for it. So it should be me that does it, then. And then my grandmother says “They’re all gone now, except for those two girls,” it breaks your heart a little to ask her to think about it.

On the other hand, the two times that I’ve started to dig into this a little bit, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more real smile than when my grandmother is talking about her grandmother. It is worth it for that alone.

Anyway, some pictures.

That guy could straight up sing:

Stringbean, my grandmother said, always wore his pants like this. So he was fashion forward.

David Akeman and his wife were killed by burglars in their home in 1973. (One of their killers died in prison in 1973. The other was paroled just last month.)

But he could play that banjo, she insisted. No kidding. I picked this one because Porter Wagoner was my grandfather’s favorite, and Roger Miller shows up, he was one of my favorites:

If you hear the term clawhammer in a musical sense, this is the meaning. It is, now, considered the “old style” of banjo playing. (Earl Scruggs, who replaced Akeman in the great Bill Monroe band, is the pioneer of the “new” three-finger style.)

I don’t remember Akeman on Hee Haw reruns, but he was there. I’m sure we all laughed at his jokes, my grandparents and me, when the scarecrow was on camera. And now that entire show suddenly seems like a portal into a different time, my grandparents watching stars they’d grown up and were growing old with. Bright colors and bad puns beamed to their antennae, guest hosts and bad skits, all of the stuff in between hearing the songs they knew.

I’m even less certain why people collect head shots and autographs of politicians, but it makes the politicians happy. Once upon a time, at least, one of these was in a lot of homes in Alabama.

I wonder where my grandparents picked all of those up.

Here she is now. She figures she was about 18 or 19 in this picture.

“Let’s talk about this wallpaper,” I said.

“Let’s not,” she said.

She’s such a sweetheart.