All you have to do is come to this COMPLETELY FREE EVENT at the Boott Mills tomorrow anytime between 10am and 3pm with up to 3 pictures and a willingness to tell why they’re important to YOU. You are the star of the Mass Memories Road Show.

10) Celebrate your family and your place in the community by sharing 3 pictures that tell historians what was important to people in the city of Lowell in 2012.

9) Meet other people and hear their stories of this great City

8) If you share 3 pictures, you get free entrance into the Boott Museum to learn about the history of the city of Lowell

7) If you have a family photo that you can’t date there will be an expert in hairstyles, fashions, and photo dating there to assist you.

6) If you have a picture that you’re pretty sure was in Lowell, but you can’t figure out where, there will be historians present to help you place your pictures.

5) You can talk to historians and archivists about how to uncover your family history and genealogy.

4) You can add your business and work to the historic record of the city. Whether you’re a restaurant, a club, a manufacturer, a lawyer or an artist – bring pictures of what you do and add it into the archives.

3) Find new connections within the community that you never knew – at previous roadshows people have actually found distant relatives just by seeing the pictures as they’re added to the collection.

2) Share your stories with people who are interested, and might even have been there too.

1) Become a star. Everyone that brings an image to the Road Show is one of of the Stars of the Show.

By sharing your stories, you allow historians and scientists to have a better picture of this city and state and assist them in figuring out what happened, when, why, and how – and how we can learn from it and make our world a better place. History is important!

I really hope to see you there.

Fondly
Stephan

“I love you,” she said.

“I know,” he smiled at her,”I really do.”

She ran her left han through her hair, “You don’t have to worry.”

“I don’t?” He asked with the vaguest hint of a fake smile hanging in the sparkle in his eyes.

She rolled her eyes casually, and started to put away dishes from the dishwasher.

After a few clinks of glass he stopped looking at her and started putting away the condiments and wiping down the stove, “You’ve always had a thing for my brother, it’s fine, I’m not mad or anything. You don’t have to pretend like I don’t know. We all have secrets.”

“You’re nuts, I never liked him at all,” she grimaced and started dropping the silverware into the tray in the drawer.

“Bullshit,” he smirked,”I’m not blind. I see the way you look at him.”

“So you’re saying that if I appreciate a nice body I’ve ‘got a thing’? Is that it?”

“Yeah”

She didn’t say much as she put the last dish away, “That’s ridiculous.”

“Not really,” he said.

“I love you, I have no desire to run off with your brother,” she said seriously.

“I know you do. I know you don’t,” he smiled, almost genuinely. She didn’t notice the difference.

She glanced in the mirror behind the stove, she could see the decades piling onto her brow, and gray building up in her dark brown hair like soap spots from cheap dishwasher detergent.

He filled the kettle and turned on the burner pausing just long enough to enjoy the edge between the blue and orange in the flame as he placed the stainless steel over the heat.

She twisted her lips into the semblance of a smile then asked as non-confrontationally as she could, “Then why’d you bring it up?”

“Sometimes, I just get tired of pretending I’m stupid.”

Her jaw dropped,”What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Sorry. Nothing. I just wish you were slightly better at keeping your secrets from me, there are some things I don’t want to know.”

She raised an eyebrow and wondered if he truly knew what she had done.

She grabbed some cookies off the shelf and sat down at the table as he put two mugs out with teabags in them.

“We all got secrets,” he said,”and it’s ok.”

He took the deck of Bicycle cards and put them in front of her. She cut the deck, and he started to shuffle them.

“Rummy?” he asked.

“Nah, I’m in the mood for some cribbage.”

“Ok, sounds good,” he watched her reach to the shelf and grab the board.

She fiddled with the meddle slide on the back and then shook the pegs out from within, “Green?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” he said.

He carefully dealt 6 cards to each of them and laid the deck down in front of her. They each looked at their hand and put two cards in front of him before she cut the cards again. He turned the cut card over, a three of hearts. He smiled at the irony.

“I wonder what you put in the crib, hope some twos,” he winked at her.

“Hey, it’s a secret,” she deadpanned.

“Indeed it is,” he reordered his cards.

He looked at her with a straight face, “For now.”

She didn’t say anything at all.

He didn’t want to take this any further, that’s enough. He certainly didn’t want her to know the truth. It’s already hard enough without that.

“I love you,” she smiled.

“I know,” he said, “I know.”

Beyond the garbage dump, the sky was a perfect melange of orange and purple. She had seen skies like this a thousand times over the years, but this twilight was more apropos than all the rest. If it’d been appropriate, she might have smiled, but not tonight, even the least worthy deserve that much respect.

A hundred gulls, each more wretched than the one before, squawked as they battled over shards of the half-poor men’s meals. They screeched to demand their space in this cemetery of stuff that isn’t stuff anymore. They almost seemed to call her name, to call her down, “Come here, come here, so we may hate you too.”

But she did not go down. She stood and watched them cry. She watched them scream. She watched them dance by the dozen around two avocado refrigerators full of darkness and probably mold. She watched them believe the world was this small no-place on the stinky-ass-side of town.

She was taken by the silhouette of a broken arm chair at the top of the largest putrescent pile against the rancid intersection between beautiful colors. It was not lost. There is no loss here. There is the delightful hope that forgetfulness will come quickly. There is the disgusting stench of rotting things best left to the earth. There are the billion billion stars, most too faint to perceive, that hang above and mock this joyful place where the corporeal bits of a small universe have been readied for burial. But there is no loss.

As the silence wafted up from the piles of people’s lives disposed and destroyed, the gulls became more quiet. Then, as the silence grew, she noticed one star. It seemed, it was laughing on the arm of the arm chair, but only for a few moments, as it rose with the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy from the slender line of horizon dividing today from tomorrow.

Perhaps, she thought, the moon was too ashamed, as yet, to join the fracas. It almost seemed, she, being half-full, was waiting for the vermin to pick the bones of all the refuse. Coon by coon, skunk by skunk, coyote by coyote, they slinked in as the hues cooled past the purples and the mauves to the navy blues and blacks.

She did not make a sound. She stood and watched this moment, this freedom, this odious air clinging to the bottom of the sky, and she knew, this had been her.

Like the twilight, she was who she had been. It seemed to her that the rise and fall of each mound was as a wave, rolling off to nowhere. The fading of light, and her thoughts suggested to her that perhaps it was time to set that person she had been upon this heap, upon that chair, beneath that nasty star, and walk away.

Freedom only comes when the garbage is gone, this much she knew too well.

Now that the house was empty of it, the barrels empty of it, the rubbish bins empty of it, the cellar, the attic, the yard – all empty of it – she was free.

But she would not smile yet, even garbage deserves proper burial first.