MY GRANDFATHER'S SLIDE-VIEWER KEYCHAIN
"The picture inside is the two of us, taken when I was three, maybe four. Miami Beach, summer of 1967 or '68."
Remember these? They used to give you one for free when you had your photos developed into slides. You held it up to the light and looked inside, and there was one of your pictures. This one has been living in the middle drawer of my writing desk for decades now. My grandfather used to use it as a keychain, then gave it to me when I was around ten.
The picture inside is the two of us, taken when I was three, maybe four. Miami Beach, summer of 1967 or '68. The Olympia Motel. We were very low-income, so our annual summer vacation was driving from the middle of the east coast of Florida down to Miami Beach for a few days at the Olympia.
Everything about being in a motel was magical, of course. The balcony! The ice machine! And my grandparents and aunt would fly down from Ohio, and we’d all be together.
My grandfather lived his entire life in the same tiny Ohio town and worked at one place: a metal foundry where he started when he was 18. By the time he died, he was some sort of supervisor. He was a sweet, funny, bighearted man who smoked a lot and dropped dead of a heart attack at 63.
In the photo—it’s one of my only pictures of him—he would have been 50 or 51. It's wild to look at the two of us and think that I'm four or five years older now than he was then, and that I’m the last surviving member of that line of my family. And who's that guy in the background? A stranger swimming past. I think it's funny that it didn't occur to my grandmother, who took the photo, to wait a few seconds for that guy to move along.
—Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan grew up in Florida and lives in New York City. He's the author of Send Me, The Dream Life of Astronauts, and Buckeye (forthcoming from Random House).