A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

Easter was a Big Deal in 1967. Not because of Easter baskets or anything like that; as a sophomore in high school, I had long outgrown anything of the sort. But, as a Catholic, we had to get extra dressed-up; we went to Mass, and then home for, as was our tradition, a hike, followed by Easter dinner. That year I had been dating Marianne Pye, a boarding student at my high school, and invited her to have Easter dinner with my family.

My sisters and friends and I typically went hiking in the undeveloped area adjacent to our neighborhood. It kept us out of our parents' hair while they cooked the dinner.

Since this was one of the major dress-up days of the year, and the main one to not involve Christmas glitter, pretty much everyone yanked out their cameras to devote a few precious frames of color film to family photos. As was to foreshadow so much of my future, somehow I got omitted from the pictures, mostly because I was the one taking them.

Cameras in those days just took a few photos on a single roll of film. And film, especially color film, was expensive. So you wouldn't want to take, say, 5 photos on a 12-exposure roll, and then just take it in to be processed, wasting the other 7 exposures.

But I was going to want to get these processed right away. (Not only couldn't I see the pictures I'd taken right away, this was before the advent of 24-hour Photo shops. So, given that I had just two exposures left, and hadn't thought to ask anyone to get one of me, I went across the street to Mr Kulwicki's house to take pictures of his outstanding rose garden.

And that was Easter, 1967, and pretty much every teenage Easter to be honest.