Young...

Photos from my youth:

Was I that young once?

From the days of the dharma bums...

I used to have a little get-together every Friday for students and faculty called the Dharma Bums. Great fun. Laughing. Poetry. Just a place for faculty and students to meet informally. Here is a poster from that era:

As they say, those were the days.

Want a cig? Some things never change...

From MedPage today:

TUCSON, Ariz. Jan. 19 - The French woman who received the world's first face transplant is reportedly doing well, but her surgeons are concerned that all their preparation and hard work could go up in smoke. The 38-year old woman, identified as Isabelle Dinoire, has renewed her smoking habit, which could interfere with her recovery, and might even jeopardize the integrity of her transplant, surgeons reported at the 6th Annual International Symposium on Composite Tissue Allotransplantation here [in Tuscon].

You get a new face; you have to smoke. Discuss among yourselves. I am gobsmacked and verklempt.

Watch out! You'll shoot yer eyes out...

Ted, my daughter Ann's boyfriend, is an art major at Penn State, as is Ann. He draws a daily comic strip with koalas as characters.

He told me last weekend about his roommates' purchases of automatic BB guns and about how they were firing the guns at each other. One of the first projects I worked on at the Harvard Injury Research Center concerned adolescent eye injuries. I warned Ted about the risk of these BB guns, and I asked him to warn the boys about the dangers involved with unsafe BB gun handling and operation. Just like a dad, eh?

Here is the installment of Ted's cartoon following our conversation:

It's a bald koala with a steaming cup of coffee: That's me!

Some pictures from the past...

My mother's father--my grandfather--died when my deceased mother was two weeks old. That was in 1910. The bowler hat...the fancy tie and shirt...the dry expression. He was born in Ireland. Long ago. I really do not know much about him. We only have an obituary from the Niagara Falls newspaper. He was a trainman. He was crushed between two train cars in a train yard.

Three men. From left to right: Kenneth Passmore; Allen Passmore; and Thomas Passmore. My father, Kenneth, and two of his brothers. No date on the photo. Maybe they are in their 30s or early 40s? Don't know. There were four brothers and three sisters. All gone now, except Thomas.

Old crusty photos. Memories cling to the dust of them. Sweat and oil from decades of fingers rubbing lightly over them. Dried. Faded. Crinkled. Torn. Worn. Lying in drawers. Secured in envelopes. Waiting for someone  to look, to see, to wonder. Orthoganal snaps of life. Paper mimicking love. Did you ever wonder whether someone would stare back at you at some distant time as the shutter opened and closed as a quarter of a breath passed through you.