Cosmin Racianu – CFR
racianucosmin.blogspot.com, on issuu and previously featured
“Aged 81, my Grandpa (quite a prankster) decides to pay a surprise visit to his former co-workers, in the CFR railway workrooms in Iași. Most of today’s employees were fresh out of school in the 90’s, so my grandpa could walk out with the same image in his head that was imprinted on his retina so many years ago, when all of his mates were still to step out of his teens. “They were like kids to me” he would tell me on the way there. On an average work-day morning, 20 years later, this unexpected reunion with the Godfather (more than a nickname for Grandpa) has generated reactions of a most contradictory nature, almost reaching impossibility, many of them couldn’t even believe their eyes, having given the Godfather up for dead a long time ago.
Once we got home, though, looking at the pictures, I saw how Grandpa started being lost in thought and being brought down by nostalgia, muttering, more for himself than anybody else, “Time grinds everything down”. I realize this flashback of two decades ago made him reconsider his own age and this was rather a reunion with himself. How one is not conscious of their limits when they come against time, how one thinks of himself as immortal, living randomly.
Now, 4 months from the event, looking back on the same pictures, I wonder whether they can render any of this past situation’s substance or are they just an illusion, a blow-up effect.”
May 19th, 2011
