Filling in the Blanks

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It was uncomfortably intimate, almost like a striptease. I was a member of a team of volunteers doing covid testing in central Washington. Our focus was on two groups: the Yakima Nation tribe, and migrant fruit pickers, both of whom had a high prevalence of covid-19. Though I’d worked with my teammates for almost a week, I didn’t really know what any of them looked like. This was because during testing we were swathed in PPE—hats, masks, face shields, gloves, gowns. Even at the motel where we were staying (in separate rooms, of course), we always wore masks. Meals were ordered in, and delivered to the meeting room. Then we grabbed our bag, and scurried off to our rooms to eat.

Thus, despite working closely with this group, I’d only seen glimpses of the top thirds of their faces. But on this day that changed. Our morning testing site was in the reservation town of White Swan, and our afternoon site wasn’t too far from there. So it didn’t make sense to go all the way back to our motel for lunch. We looked for the taco truck we’d seen in the nearby town of Wapato the previous day, but it wasn’t there. So we had no choice but to eat at the only restaurant that was open.

It felt strange to walk into a restaurant–the first one I’d set foot in in many months–and stranger still to sit at a table so close to other people. Instinctively, we spread out as far as possible. The polite, properly masked server passed out menus, and we ordered through our N-95s. Conversation was attenuated as we waited for our food. Eventually our meals arrived, and slowly my teammates took off their masks. To my utter surprise, the intimacy of this reveal made me feel quite uneasy; it was hard to look anyone straight in the eye. I think I was the last person to un-mask.

Everyone’s face seemed so large, and so bare. But what struck me most was how different my teammates looked than I’d imagined. Carmen’s chin was much sharper, and her mouth smaller. George, it turned out, was Japanese! With his mask, hat, and face shield in place, I had barely been able to see his face at all. And to my surprise, Roscoe had a beard, and a nose that was more prominent than the one I’d placed beneath his mask. I ate my burrito while stealing glances at these exposed, foreign faces, marveling at how different these people looked than the ones I’d been working with all week.



The Wapato restaurant reveal was unsettling. It made me realize that when we interact with others we’re engaged in a constant process of filling in the blanks. I’m not just talking about just filling in the physical blanks–though we certainly may be surprised at the beach when we see a friend or a relative in a bathing suit for the first time! What I mean is this: When we meet someone new, I think that we almost immediately begin to make inferences about them. Even before they open their mouths, we study how they’re dressed, their hairstyle, their presumed ethnicity, and even the way they move. Based on an unconscious integration of all these observations, we make assumptions about their nationality, religion, politics, and education. And after we hear them speak, we make additional conjectures based on their accent and vocabulary. For example, after only a few minutes of interaction with a stranger we may unconsciously peg her as a not particularly well-educated Southerner. This leads to a guess that she probably works in a menial job, and is politically conservative. Then, after a bit more conversation, aren’t we surprised to learn that she’s an engineer for Westinghouse, and a strong supporter of Black Lives Matter! Or, if our initial impression leads us to believe that someone we’ve just met is urban, educated, and well-travelled we may conclude that if he has any spiritual aspirations, he’s a Unitarian at best. But on further conversation, it turns out that he’s a deacon in his Southern Baptist congregation. Only when more of who they really are is revealed do we realize that we had presumptuously—and erroneously–filled in the blanks.

Like watching Bob Ross paint a picture, this fill-in-the-blanks process is dynamic. Sometimes we correctly predict where his trees will go, and that there will be an idyllic stream flowing towards us at the bottom of the painting. But just as often we’re wrong—the trees were on the other side of the mountain, and where we thought a stream would be was simply a valley floor, bursting with lovely spring flowers. So maybe it’s better just to watch Bob paint, and not anticipate what he’s going to put where.

So after the sobering experience of the restaurant reveal, when I meet someone new, I pledge to avoid prematurely filling in the blanks. Rather, I’ll try to keep an open mind, and expect to learn more as I get to know them. I won’t make Carmen’s chin round before I know that it’s actually sharp, or decide whether Roscoe is clean shaven or has a beard. I’ll try just to be sensitive and curious, and with time hope to learn more about who they really are.

Life’s Detritus

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I finally acceded to Annie’s gentle but insistent requests to clear out our rat’s nest of a garage. It had been sinking into a state of increasing dissolution for years—what was the hurry? But to honor her, I grudgingly agreed.

Among the first atrocities to surface was a black plastic bag containing something substantial. With apprehension, I undid the red ties. Oh no! It was brim full of boxes of 35 mm slide carousels. We’d recently finished the painful process of reviewing about two thousand slides, and the last thing I wanted was a reprise. It had been easy to chuck those that were out of focus, the beautiful but entirely generic flowers, and images of vacation sunsets and beach houses lacking any human beings. Harder was deciding what to do with the many unmemorable slides of people we knew but weren’t particularly close to: With some ambivalence, into the wastebasket went my great uncle holding an unidentified kid in some sort of stranglehold, our sweet neighbor and her blurry pet bunny, and the kids down the street self-consciously posing with those maple seed “helicopters” stuck to their noses. Hardest of all was dealing with the precious but long-gone pets, gala holiday dinners, and shots of family, many of which were ill-composed, unflattering, or redundant. We faced endless fraught decisions as to which images should be irrevocably destroyed, and which should be tediously labeled, packed up, and sent off for digitization.

I thought we were finally done with that grueling process. But now I was confronted with a bag bulging with—count ‘em–eight more carousels. Even if these were the 80-slide models rather than the super-sized 140-slide versions, we were facing the possibility of over 600 more images to sort through! My heart sank. And I felt cross with Annie for goading me to clean up the garage in the first place.

Gingerly, I opened the first box. Yahoo—the carousel was empty! That was at least one tray of slides I wouldn’t have to deal with. Then came the next box—bingo! It too contained an empty carousel. I took a breath, and then opened the third. Same thing: empty. Then with increasing confidence, I opened the rest of the boxes. Every carousel in every box was completely devoid of slides; hallelujah!

But after the 35 mm dust settled, I thought about it: Why was I so pleased that there were no further beautiful images, or family photos, or travel snapshots, each of which could evoke precious memories? Wouldn’t it have been a gift to unexpectedly have yet more photographs to review and reminisce over? And then digitize the most meaningful ones for posterity?

Well, maybe. But on the other hand, I thought, even if there had been slides in the carousels, it would have been tempting to avoid the pain of dealing with these filmy little devils by chucking them directly into the trash. Tempting, but somehow criminal. I would surely have felt an obligation to review and process any new slides that turned up. But to take another step back, maybe I should have binned the entire bag without even opening it. I couldn’t have felt a sense of loss if I didn’t know what I was losing.


While writing this post and thinking about what to do with accumulated stuff that I didn’t want to deal with, I heard a gentle but nagging growl coming from the bookcase in my office. It emanated from a thick stack of yellow, crumbling newspapers that sat on the bottom shelf. I’ve been collecting them for over half a century. To test my recent musings, I toyed with the idea of tossing them all, sight unseen, as my family has more than twice suggested. But rather than doing the sensible thing, I irresistibly started flipping through the ancient stack. I knew that I had saved a Washington Post from the day Kennedy was assassinated, but had no idea what else was there.

What a revelation it turned out to be! After going through the whole pile, I didn’t find that precious Kennedy assassination headline that perhaps I only imagined I’d saved. What I did find was quite a mixture: “JAPS BOMB U.S.” was the blaring (and cringeworthy) headline from the Greensboro, N.C. Daily News from December 7, 1941. That was even before my time—I have no idea how it made its journey from Greensboro to the bottom shelf of one of my office bookcases. Then was “Mr. Nixon resigns as President” from The London Times (“price six pence”) from August 9, 1974, followed by “Carter Winner,” from the Nov 3, 1976 Oregonian, which preceded “Regan sweeps vote,” from November 5, 1980. Here comes “Eruption decapitates St Helens; at least 9 die,” from the May 19th, 1980 Oregonian. There were historic headlines from the Raleigh News and Observer, about the space shuttle explosion and the demise of the Soviet Union. Then I came to the April 3, 1987 Washington Post: “$87.5 Billion Highway Bill Enacted over Regan’s Veto.” Huh? How did that get in the pile? Or, for that matter, the Nov 29, 1999 issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “WTO is peaceful, even polite.” I guess at the time this must have been big news, but was it worth saving for posterity? Or maybe some of these papers were meant to be recycled, but were accidently diverted to the bottom shelf, where they’ve moldered for decades.

Now, once again, I find myself faced with a slide-like decision: I can cheerfully recycle most of them, and ruefully shake my head that I’d kept them to yellow and rot and take up space in my bookcase for so many years. But what about the really historic ones, like the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the Mt St Helens eruption? Well, I took a deep breath, and chucked them all into oblivion. (If you’d like any of them, please let me know right away, before I put the recycle bin out in the driveway.) Yahoo, I did it–there’s now a lovely empty space on my bookcase shelf! Long may it remain bare.

With that unexpected and cathartic newspaper cleanout, I return to thoughts of slides. I realize that the newspaper and slide situations are a bit different—though each is historic, the newspapers document public events known to all, whereas the slides are of interest only for me and my family. Online I can easily find newspaper headlines about WWII, but not photographs of my father’s 80th birthday party.

So I’m back to thinking that maybe it’s not unreasonable to curate family slides, no matter how painful. But where does that lead? Say we carefully sort through them, chuck most, and have the survivors digitized. Then I store the files on my hard drive under “photos/family.” Excellent. But then what? Well, maybe when the pandemic is over, and our daughters and their families come over we’ll have a slide show. Some memories will be resurrected and discussed, probably with disagreements about who else was there, or what we ate at that special dinner at the beach. Then someone’s cell phone rings, and someone grabs a magazine and starts reading an article. And things sort of break up before all 476 slides were projected. Then what?

The next time everyone is over, after lunch I weakly suggest that we watch the rest of the slides. There’s a notable lack of enthusiasm, though the polite son-in-law manages to mumble, “sounds great!” But the grandkids have run outside to throw a football, Annie and one of the daughters are doing the dishes, and someone else’s cell rings again. Any slide momentum is thus lost, and we never get around to seeing them.

Then the digitized photographs lie fallow in the hard drive for years, until the computer tells us that we’re running out of disk space. It advises the removal of unimportant files. Or until we pass on and our kids–or maybe grandkids–have to deal with gigabytes of slides, scanned diaries, and other life detritus. But at least the electronic clutter doesn’t take up any space in the garage, doesn’t get dusty, and is quite easily ignored. Or can be simply deleted, without anyone looking to see the contents.