Seeking Frozen Sound

My father, Dale Lunberry (1927-2012), was a jeweler and watchmaker in a small town in Kansas, the place where I grew up. For decades, when traveling, always with his wife, my mother, Barbara Lunberry (1929-2002), he often purchased travel postcards of the various places visited. These hundreds of postcards (more than 750) were, as far as I know, never sent to anyone through the mail, and were instead collected and later carefully catalogued, as souvenirs, perhaps as a means of remembering the many places they had been. Rarely is anything written on the backs of these postcards (my father was a man of few words), however, there might occasionally be seen a brief inscription (in my father's unmistakable handwriting) of the date on which the place on the postcard was visited: "6-26-63,""Apr. 7, 74,""8-19-64," or, at most, for a particular Hawaiian hotel, "Here 3 days Jan 21-24, 83." At my father's death in 2012, I inherited his box of postcards, but I was uncertain of what I would ever do with it (though reluctant to throw it away, as so much else had been thrown away). So, I held onto the box, placing it in a closet, mostly forgetting about it. One day during the spring of 2020, with COVID's arrival, and the consequences of suddenly spending so much time at home (and, importantly, of not traveling), I got the box of travel postcards out of the closet and began casually sorting through them. Picking out those cards that were particularly striking or strange, often oddly beautiful, I was drawn to how so many of the colorful pictures vividly spoke of other times, other places (with, for instance, the characteristic blues of the postcard skies offering a mid-century modern variant of the poeticized French azure). While those who were anonymously photographed in the postcards (walking on sidewalks, standing on street corners, lounging on a sandy beach...) reminded me of that which, though obvious, is often overlooked-that postcards are indeed photographs.