Sometimes people can keep surprising you even after they’re gone, and some old pictures have provided one family with a fascinating window into a previously unknown chapter of a loved one’s life: When this family looked through their late grandmother’s photo albums, they saw she used to have a giraffe-like neck and rolled with a giraffe-necked crew.
Wow, imagine stumbling on a totally forgotten piece of family history like that!
Last week, the living members of the Holt family recently decided to mark the two-year anniversary of their beloved Grandma Esther’s death by opening up some old photo albums they’d found tucked away in a trunk while cleaning out her attic, hoping the photos might rekindle their gradually dimming memories of her. But instead of finding only the reserved, normally proportioned woman they’d known in life, they were stunned to discover a number of early photographs showing their grandma as a carefree, giraffe-necked young twenty-something, running with a tight-knit set of friends all sporting elongate, giraffe-like necks of their own. This came as quite a shock, since neither she nor their grandfather had ever mentioned anything about her having a swaying, four-and-a-half foot long neck before, though considering that Grampa Dave doesn’t appear in any of these photos, it’s possible that he too was in the dark about his wife’s giraffe-necked past.
The photos paint a vivid picture of a giraffe-necked young woman in love with the world and her giraffe-necked squad. In one, their smiling grandmother skates between two of her giraffe-necked gal pals at an outdoor rink, her gigantic neck wrapped in no fewer than 12 different scarves. In another, the whole crew assembles around three giraffe-necked young men in naval uniforms, a strikingly celebratory sendoff for what signs visible through the forest of their long necks suggest will be service in WWII’s European theater.
And in one particularly intriguing photo labeled “Esther + Bob,” their grandmother stands with the handsomest of those three servicemen, here sporting a sharp suit with a huge, sailboat-like collar, and cranes her massive neck over to light a cigarette off a match the man tenderly holds aloft for her. Of course the Holts know their grandmother would go on to have a normal neck and marry Grampa Dave somewhere around 1948, but given how closely the man’s other arm holds her waist, it’s not hard to imagine that this giraffe-necked mystery man could have been their giraffe-necked grandfather if things had gone just a little differently.
There’s so much they must wish they could ask her about her days in the giraffe-necked scene!
You’ve got to wonder what exactly made their late grandmother give up the giraffe-necked life: whether it was some personal tragedy, or a falling out with her giraffe-necked gang, or simply the sense that it was time to grow up and put the frivolities of her giraffe-necked lifestyle behind her. People change, sure, but she looked so happy to be rolling with that giraffe-necked pack. Did she never mention it because she was embarrassed? Or were the memories of her giraffe-necked youth, teetering around town with her head scraping ceilings and getting lost among the tree branches, so unbearably dear to her that it was all she could do to hide them away in the attic and try her best to forget?
Damn, the Holt family never would have known that their quiet little grandmother used to rock a crazy-long giraffe neck if not for these photo albums. It just goes to show that you never really know what kind of amazing secrets a person’s past might hold!
