JONATHAN: THE VANITY PROJECT

[With parents and sister, 1948]

Recently I donated to the archive at the University of South Alabama my 450+ page unpublished memoir "Story-Telling," to be made publicly available after my death. I had selected that archive because it alreay houses a major collection of invaluablel material dealing with Unbria Plantation and the Pickens family of Sawyerville and my memoir also features Umbria and that family prominently as well as a great deal of material about Sawyerville at the time and over the years. I subsequently discovered that my memoir was valuable to them for other reasons asa well. Along with the memoir I included a weatlh of photos of Umbria, including the old HABS photographs, a large number of color photos taken in the spring of 1971 before the house burned the following December, and photos I had made of the ruins in 1999. In addition I included my files of photos that illustrate Sawyerville over the years and files with photos of my paternal and maternal relatives. And then I thought: If I were reading this memoir in the future I would wish to know what the author himself looked lilke. Hence this file, which I will share withj you.

There are lots of baby pictures. Those I didn't include because I looked like a baby. I thougnht 1948, above, was a good starting point. I was 9 at the time.

1957, with my father. I assume this was Sunday morniing after we got dressed to go to the BaccalaureateService honoring graduating seniours at the First Methodist Church of Greensboro.

Note the already seriously receding hairline on the younger May. This is a atheme that will continue.

(By the way, the smaller photos may be enlarged with a click, if you care.)

1966. This was taaken in our woods behind ouir house on one of my early trips home from New York, where I had moved in January of 1962.

I was still a skinny boy then. The more the hair recedes, the more the tummy will expand. At this time I was 6 feet tall and weighed 147 pounds.

Today I am 5 foot 10 inches tall and weigh 214 pounds.

​1966. Central Park.

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Still 1966. Still Central Park.  No, I didn't leve there. I just spent a lot of time in there. At the time I was living in a 5th fooor walk-up on East 60th Street between Park and Lexington. Souds elegant. It wasn't.

When I first moved to New York I lived in a 5th floor walk-up in the middled of a courtyard (you entered the courtyard throgh a tunnel) on Sullivan Stree a block and a half below Houston Street. I moved uptown 2 years later.

Beefcake! 1967. On the beach at Gulf Shores. Almost every time I came home we made a trip to the coast.

Same day, same beach. 

Are you paying attention to the hairline?

Odd about losing my hair. It began so early and I was used to the look from my father and some of my uncless, and I never associated baldness with old age and its aattendant woes. I was never attempted to try the comb-over or implants. This was just the way I was.

​1975. Atop World Trade Center. Even balder, more tunny.

Same day, same place. The WTC was under construction when I moved to New York. I loved it. That was unfashionable at the time. It was thought to be a bore and a desecration of the skyline. After 9/11 other folks began to love it. Johnnie Come Latelies.

I was clerckint at the post office in Boligee that awful day with no TV or radio and was kept abrest of develoments by my friend Tom, who called regularly with updates.

​1984, with my father, old Lock 7 Park. 2 years before his death, 5 years before I moved from New York.

I loved that park. It is abandoned and derelict now.

​1985. Same me, same park. 

​1985. Same trip, now at the Gulf Coast. I rarely wore a hat or  cap in those days, and rarely sunglasses as well. I would have been in better shape today had I not been so resistant to them.

Still 1985. Back in New York at Tom's apartment.

​1989. With Tom at Lock 7 Park. This was probably our first visit there after I moved home.

​The same day.

1992. That yew tree was purchased by my mother as a seedling with funds she made in the 1950s doing school census. I toopped it later that year because it was starting to brush against the main phone line to the house. Nobody had told me that this tree didn't like to be toopped, and I thought it had died. But it came back.

​1992. Why am I dressed up? Must have been a funeral.

​Same day, with Huckleberry.  Huck would have been 7 at the time.

​August 1992. With Huck ant Tom.

​April 1999, with Roscoe and roofing material.

Huck had died exactly a month before we found Roscoe abandoned on the side of a road in Perrjy County.

April 1999. You can see the extra pounds now.

​1992, with Tom on the wewst side of the goaty pasture behind the house.

1992, with 2 of the goats, Buttercup and either Mean Brown Goat or Other Brown Goat. I had already buried Mama-San by then. I buried all 4 of them over time, Buttercul being the last to go.

That bench was made by my Uncle Fletcher out of a split log and some old pipes as legs.

2002. With Roscoe and Azalea. Tom died in December 2007, Roscoe exatcly 2 and a half years later in June of 2010

​2019.  Older and meaner.

​2020. Even older nd even mean. Not really. I just don't smile a lot. Those muscles have atrophied.

Vanity? Maybe, but maybe not.  You can learn a lot by looking at yourself over time. All my life I had considered myself to be fairly homely. But looking back I seetat I was somewhat better-lookng than that.  I says who shouldn't. But one more thing to add to my tall stack of If I knew Then What I know Now. You probably have one of those too.

I think I wuld have liked to have known me.
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