2024 52 Card Project: Week 13: Palimpsest

[pegkerr]

I've been thinking about Minicon, which I attended last week. And I've been thinking about the concept of a palimpsest:

a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

I have been going to Minicon for forty years (well, aside for the years when it wasn't held due to Covid). That means a lot of memories. Minicon has long been a joy and a delight, an event to which Rob and I looked forward every year. We brought our kids--Fiona went to her first Minicon when she was only ten days old. We always got a hotel room. Many years, we worked on the convention committee. Rob was the Head of Operations when Minicon was in its heyday, when Minicon attracted more than 3,000 people. I cut my writing teeth at Minicon. I made so many friends, so many personal and professional connections. It was a cherished family ritual.

Now, I am the only member of my family who still goes. And as much as I still love it, and as much as the familiar soothes and comforts, it is also painful. Going to Closing Ceremonies and not seeing Rob there is so, so painful.

I didn't go to Closing Ceremonies this year.

I wandered around the con and took pictures of all the signs hanging up. They put those signs in storage and pull them out again every year. The memories are the same, yet different. I see a sign, and I see the sign again in my memory, in all the different Minicons in my mind.

So I created the collage from the signs seen around the convention, and over them, I placed ghostly memory images of Rob and myself. Back when we were young, when Minicon was nothing but joy, a string of dazzling conversations and fascinating interactions. I still feel ghostly echoes of that joy, but it's not quite the same. Minicon is not the same.

I attend Minicon, and I see traces of all the previous Minicons.

I don't see Rob.

Image description: logo for Minicon 57 March 29-31 2024. The rest of the card is made up of tiled signs seen around the convention (Consuite, Bar, Art Show, Dealer's Room, Programming This Way, Opening Ceremonies, Minicon Volunteers). Semi-transparent black-and-white images of a young man on a telephone (Rob, working as the Head of Operations on the Bridge) and a smiling seated woman (Peg) hover over the signs.

Palimpsest



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Comments

[pameladean]

This one really hits hard. I remember seeing those signs when the long-time hotel broke its contract with Minicon and we were in a couple of different hotels for five years. But the signs were the same. We're in yet another hotel now, with a weird overlayering of so many memories because it was the original Fourth Street hotel, and there have been so many losses; but the signs remain.

I haven't been to a Minicon since 2019, so there's that, too.

Young Peg and Rob are so familiar to me. Sometimes I just think of you both that way.

P.

[laramie]

For very different reasons, Minicon is a very different convention for me, too.
These days it reminds me of many losses, from Rob, and Baron Dave Romm to Denny Lien and Margie and Ben Lessinger. The signs are so familiar. I can't remember which ones I helped create.