Object-ives #38: A Box of Slides

What Kodachrome helped me discover about my father

Jun 05, 2026

My dad and his buddy at hunting camp, somewhere in Canada, mid-1950s

The tiny clasp on the silver metal box snapped so hard that when my fingers were short and tender and I was adventurous enough to pry it open, my brave forefinger would come away pinched and painful. But I loved to open this rectangular box of slides, a kid-scale suitcase with a handle, which was rather like my father: slim, compact, single purposed.

The box contained slides from my father’s life before he met my mother. There was an entire row of Kodachrome images of his French girlfriend on a beach, at a picnic, on a French city street, her dark hair coiffed. He took no pains to hide these from me, or us, but my sisters were too little then.

The drawer in the sideboard where the box lived was a Pandora’s box all my own. My mother shoved photographs into that drawer, full sets of class pictures we never bothered to cut up and share, except the obligatory pictures for our grandparents. Fat red envelopes of photos developed at K-Mart all during my high school years were a reminder of my own past. I visited the contents of this drawer every time I came home from my life in faraway places because there was evidence of my father and his early courtship with my mother. There was even a photograph of me as a baby, in a lake, laughing. I love that one.

Once my mother rid herself of much of what had been her life raising the four of us girls on her own, both before and after my father left when I was 14 and my youngest sister was 3, this box was up for grabs. She must have known I wanted it and every single photograph in that drawer of the sideboard, which she sold at a garage sale for cheap. She dumped the contents into a packing box and kept it for me in the basement of her new house with her new husband.

Eight years later, when I too married and gained a house, the packing box of photographs and the slide box were the first things I took from that well-ordered basement where everything was shelved according to daughter, or date, just as tidy as the rows and rows of peaches and strawberries they froze in plastic baggies for their winter Grape Nuts breakfasts.

In my basement, the box sat waiting. It waited for my kids to get big enough to shake my foundation, big enough for me to need to get a handle on my childhood, which I sought to do through writing. The slide box became a compass of sorts. I’d grab a slide and peer at it with a flashlight or up against my desk lamp. It felt too consequential to invest in a slide viewer, or better yet, an Epson slide reader which converts these old images to a digital file that I can enlarge on my desktop and see details I never knew existed.

Now I have that.

How my father carried his cigarette in the outer corner of his mouth, smiling around it. My mother was so skinny. How most photographs of me as a baby don’t show me smiling, but with a rather surprised look on my round face. Well, I was smiling in the one I like best, that slide of baby me on a rock in Gilas Lake. I still smile in lakes.

I have digitized most of those images. Peered at the French woman and wondered where she is now. Does she think longingly about her American GI who worked for American Express during the war, who broke it off perhaps when he was dishonorably discharged for something he never mentioned? Does she dream of my father still? I wonder about her, belted skirt, bandeau top, the military parade they watched with gunfire that created gusts of smoke my father caught with his camera. A camera I never knew.

There is one slide of my father at a hunting camp, a bottle of Dawe’s Ale on the shelf above his head. He sits in a bed next to his buddy, who holds a lit cigarette between his toes as he reads, legs crossed in a figure four pose, orange hunting cap slung on his knee. In a grungy white t-shirt, the guy tucks a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey next to his chest with his elbow. My father in a striped pajama top sits beside the toe-smoking reader and strums a guitar, his head tipped. Again, something I never saw him do. The side table is littered with an ashtray, a wallet, and a deck of cards. This is an image I never could make out until I got the Epson, until my fingers where strong enough not to get pinched.

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