The 4-inch black and white photograph, though frayed at the corners is remarkably clear. The year is 1932. He’s 15 years old, wearing a baseball uniform with “Indians” printed across his jersey. He looks vibrant, handsome and strong. He wears a smile on his face. Nineteen years later, the boy in the photograph, Nicholas Strack would become my father. From all the pictures of him taken later, this one is special, my favorite.

Old photographs are visual memories and like this one of my dad as a boy, they give us a glimpse of our families who grew up in a different time before we knew them.

When my mother died in 1997, my sisters and I closed the door on her house for the last time, but at the same time, we opened a window to her and my dad’s younger lives through photographs I look at from time to time.

I see him here posed in a suit and tie next to mom wearing a white wedding gown. Here they are again together with their first child, Nancy, standing in front and my sister, Carol, tucked inside Mom’s bulging belly. I wouldn’t come along for another five years. In another photo, Dad holds a guitar. He wears a black hat, typical of those worn in the 1940s.

I have a collection of these photographs in a memory book that I am leaving as a legacy to my children so they can see their grandparents who had died long before Richie and Sadie were born. One picture is of the white Cape Cod house that my father had built set on a dirt road in New Market, New Jersey. My first dog, Skippy sits in the background tied to an oak tree I used to climb.

My mind travels beyond the photographs. I see Mom’s clothes line in the backyard and my dad’s long sleeve shirts blowing in an autumn breeze. I’m 10 years old. I have a red and white helmet on my head and a football in my hand. I’m running for a touchdown through the laundry, stiff arming my way through dad’s shirts that are trying to tackle me. I lower my head. I bust through them all and I shout, “Touchdown!”

I spread more photos across the table. There’s me standing with the Dowd brothers who lived down the street where I rode my bicycle that I had found left for the trash on the side of a road. I sanded down the metal frame and painted it black and red. With big thick tires and a basket to hold the Newark Star Ledger newspapers I delivered to the neighborhood. My bike I called the “Beast.” Together we rode through pot holes, over tarred streets and pedaled on packs of snow grooved by the plowing trucks.

Old photographs are magical. You stare into a scene frozen in time and your thoughts move to other pictures, those never taken by a camera, but framed inside the corners of your memories. From the front of our Cape Cod, there was a field of wildflowers and blackberries that was across the road. Orange monarch butterflies danced above the flowers. I got close to one. She sat upon a purple flower and gently flapped her wings. If I had a video of this scene, I’d name it “Poetry in Motion.”

Life in New Market for me and my family was riddled with despair, but as I grew farther away from that reality, I chose what I want to remember. In the song, “The Way We Were,” by Barbra Streisand, she sings, “Memories may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”

You don’t really forget, but what you want to remember you can will into the front of your mind and leave the rest behind. I looked again at my dad in his baseball uniform and I can’t help but think how much he resembles my son. Family and friends have said they are near identical in their facial features. Even my son agrees. This is a spiritual awakening for me. Dad has come back to me with the birth of my son, gifting me with a new appreciation I have for the man who was seriously ill during most of my childhood.

I believe that my son and daughter will never share a beautiful moment of reminiscing through physical photographs. They live in a digital world where pictures are stored inside a computer or cellphone leaving little probability that they will sit down on a snowy winter morning one day and search through their electronics for childhood photographs.

I can travel through time easily. Old photographs spin my mind into extraordinary memories of ordinary experiences. I hold a photograph book of family and friends in my hands. I turn the pages and pictures, once scattered about in an old metal box, become the stories from years of yesterdays of the way we were.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com