Sarah Di Domenico bought a tin trunk at a store closing sale and found inside hundreds of handwritten love letters addressed to the same man. All dated throughout the 1950s, written by many women. She read them all and identified one great love. This complete stranger of years past, Omar, soon became a new man in her life.
She transcribed the letters, uprooted lost photographs, and photographed pieces of ephemera from 1940s maps to passports to thing-a-ma-bobs. A Young Man’s Follies is a website that documents and shares each handwritten letter and all of these pieces (except 1 pair of ladies underwear).
Play relationship voyeur and fall in love with a time when love was made by pen and ink.
A strange set of circumstances happened last month which mimics this story. I received a box of photos and documents that were passed from Donna’s (my late wife) estranged brother to his girlfriend following his death in 2006.
The girl friend passed away this year and her friend was cleaning the house and found a box of photos and documents. There were photos of Donna, her mother, and various family members including her uncle Oscar Leibowitz. Donna’s mothers brother. Surprisingly the box even contained her grandparents naturalization papers and documents.
I created this blog post about Oscar who I believed was not only lost in WWII but lost from family. Shortly after the post I received a note from Oscars half sister who happened to stumble on this while doing a search on Veterans Day. How wonderful to link family members.
http://www.bioc.net/blog/2015/11/9/airman-lost-airman-found-creating-a-memory
Mar 4th, 2016 / 10:28 am