Chapter III
The next day at work I kept thinking about that stupid pistol. Where had I seen it before? Nothing came up on Google and I spent my lunch hour searching eBay and all the gun sites I could find. Nothing. If I hadn't seen the one Granma had, where had I seen one? being distracted the rest of the day by this puzzle, didn't produce any results, either in my work, or in my memory.
Driving home, I stopped at the office supply stor to grab some CD's. I was just about done with the museum photographs and I needed to get some CD's, jewelcases, and labels so that mom could sell the CD's of photos at the museum. When I had first scanned the photos in the museum, rather than scan them one at a time, I put as many photos as I could on the scanner and did mass scanning. Dalla had her computer there as well, and she was scanning right alongside me. My aunt Marge and mom were running back and forth from the archives room bringing us the photos. In retrospect, we should have set the computers up in the archive room, but it was such a mess after the storm. Setting up at least on the same floor as the archives room would have at least been easier on mom's and Marge's knees since the museum didn't have an elevator.
Once we had all the photos scanned, I pulled Dalla's hard drive, put it in my PC, copied all the phots and then once I got back to Oklahoma, I would seperate each photo and save it as a seperate file. Eventually, we would have all the photos on CD and thought we could sell copies to visitors. Also, during the whole scanning process, we assigned a number to each photo and we wrote down all the information we could find about the photo. Some pictures had writing on the back, others that were displayed in the museum had a small framed text that went with the picture. Still, others had just what Marge or mom could tell us about them, which may or may not have been accurate. When I saved the file for each picture, I also added all this information in the description of the file, that way the entire collection of photos could be searched on the PC. If you wanted all the pictures of the Truman visit, type in TRUMAN, and the search would fiind all of them. I also listed prominent buildings and locations and people, however, the bulk of what we had fell under the category of UNKNOWN. Our unspoken hope was that someone would recognize a photo and give us the history behind it.
Walking through the store, I grabbed what I needed and then tooled down the software aisle seeing if they had any special or closeouts. As I walked down the aisle I had one of my flashes. Some folks call it Deja Vu, but it wasn't exactly like that. I can only explain that it's like someone taking all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, throwing them in the air, and miraclously the picture forms in midair, complete and recognizable for a split second before it crashed to the ground, back into the jumble it started as. The flash hit me, but I wasn't able to see the picture, wasn't able to recognize what I was supposed to know.
I turned around and started down the aisle again. I once heard that if you think of something, and the forget it, go back to where you thought of it. Our mind is strongly triggered based on what we see, hear, or smell. If you return to the origin of the thought, the trigger might still be there. I walked slowly down the aisle, hoping the trigger would hit me again.
There it was. In the geneology software, the package had a collection of old photos on the cover. The picture in the upper right corner was a sepia-tone of a cowboy with his arms crossed, holding two pistols. I know what you're thinking. The pistols were "Jake's Best". Nope, wish it was true, but no. I didn't recognize the cowboy, the pistols, the background or anything like that. It was the stance. I recognized the stance. Big deal. Arms crossed, pistols pointing upwards, chest thrust out and the hat back on the head, it could have been from any western I had ever seen. But still, it was a flash and those only happen when my brain is trying to solve a problem I've been working too hard on. It was signal to stop working on the problem and let the pieces fall into place.
Driving home, I stopped at the office supply stor to grab some CD's. I was just about done with the museum photographs and I needed to get some CD's, jewelcases, and labels so that mom could sell the CD's of photos at the museum. When I had first scanned the photos in the museum, rather than scan them one at a time, I put as many photos as I could on the scanner and did mass scanning. Dalla had her computer there as well, and she was scanning right alongside me. My aunt Marge and mom were running back and forth from the archives room bringing us the photos. In retrospect, we should have set the computers up in the archive room, but it was such a mess after the storm. Setting up at least on the same floor as the archives room would have at least been easier on mom's and Marge's knees since the museum didn't have an elevator.
Once we had all the photos scanned, I pulled Dalla's hard drive, put it in my PC, copied all the phots and then once I got back to Oklahoma, I would seperate each photo and save it as a seperate file. Eventually, we would have all the photos on CD and thought we could sell copies to visitors. Also, during the whole scanning process, we assigned a number to each photo and we wrote down all the information we could find about the photo. Some pictures had writing on the back, others that were displayed in the museum had a small framed text that went with the picture. Still, others had just what Marge or mom could tell us about them, which may or may not have been accurate. When I saved the file for each picture, I also added all this information in the description of the file, that way the entire collection of photos could be searched on the PC. If you wanted all the pictures of the Truman visit, type in TRUMAN, and the search would fiind all of them. I also listed prominent buildings and locations and people, however, the bulk of what we had fell under the category of UNKNOWN. Our unspoken hope was that someone would recognize a photo and give us the history behind it.
Walking through the store, I grabbed what I needed and then tooled down the software aisle seeing if they had any special or closeouts. As I walked down the aisle I had one of my flashes. Some folks call it Deja Vu, but it wasn't exactly like that. I can only explain that it's like someone taking all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, throwing them in the air, and miraclously the picture forms in midair, complete and recognizable for a split second before it crashed to the ground, back into the jumble it started as. The flash hit me, but I wasn't able to see the picture, wasn't able to recognize what I was supposed to know.
I turned around and started down the aisle again. I once heard that if you think of something, and the forget it, go back to where you thought of it. Our mind is strongly triggered based on what we see, hear, or smell. If you return to the origin of the thought, the trigger might still be there. I walked slowly down the aisle, hoping the trigger would hit me again.
There it was. In the geneology software, the package had a collection of old photos on the cover. The picture in the upper right corner was a sepia-tone of a cowboy with his arms crossed, holding two pistols. I know what you're thinking. The pistols were "Jake's Best". Nope, wish it was true, but no. I didn't recognize the cowboy, the pistols, the background or anything like that. It was the stance. I recognized the stance. Big deal. Arms crossed, pistols pointing upwards, chest thrust out and the hat back on the head, it could have been from any western I had ever seen. But still, it was a flash and those only happen when my brain is trying to solve a problem I've been working too hard on. It was signal to stop working on the problem and let the pieces fall into place.
posted by Dwayne "the canoe guy" at 9:27 PM
2 comments
