Every picture tells a story:

After our father's death, my sister and I faced the task of sorting through his belongings – as best we could. During his last few years, Daddy's packrat tendencies became a full-blown compulsion, and there was literally a single path coursing through knee-high (or higher) stacks of . . . stuff . . . in his house.

The kitchen countertop was piled about a foot high with years' worth of mail and other papers that you could tell were important to him, somehow. While sorting through this mess, I came across a black-and-white photo of an animal skeleton partially embedded in dirt. There was no writing on the back, but since the photo was in amongst some correspondence and cards from family in Norway, I guessed that perhaps some interesting paleontological find had been unearthed in the homeland, and sat the photo aside to ask my uncle about it.

I was quite off base with my guess. The true story was that one of my father's beloved cats had gone missing – for quite some time. Eventually the poor thing was discovered, in skeletal form, in the basement – and my dad took its picture, as a memento. Thus a hard-learned lesson about the dangers of romanticizing the unknown.

(In case you're wondering how a dead cat could go undetected for a lengthy period of time, my father's sense of smell was ruined during the course of too many youthful chemistry experiments.)

The picture below tells a different story. That's my father on the far right, with his 3 brothers and my grandmother. It was taken on the family farm in Trondheim, Norway, probably just before my father left for America, circa 1953.