When I was a kid, family gatherings meant high decibel levels. After all, Italian families know only two volumes: loud and a whole helluva lot louder. If an outside observer—say, a friend from school—were to join us for dinner, he would sit and stare in awe as the conversation started and rarely ceased. This, in and of itself, would not strike the friend as altogether strange; what would cause such odd looks of disbelief would be, instead, the absurd amount of actual conversations taking place at once. For example, my grandfather might be talking to my grandmother about the New York Yankees, but my grandmother, completely ignoring my grandfather’s topic of conversation, would talk to him instead about the weather and how it had turned so fiercely cold. That they were talking to each other about totally different topics never slowed them. These are the conversations I grew up with.
One of those outside observers—that awed friend—was, in particular, a fairly constant presence at my house. Joe Arthur would sit at that table and keep his giggles to himself until after the meal, at which time he would say something like, “How do they know what the other is saying if they’re not actually listening?” To which I would reply, “Who said they weren’t listening?” I figured Joe didn’t get it and never would.
But he did get it.
When I approached him with the idea of creating a magazine in which a writer collaborates with a photographer to create a story about a common theme, he jumped at the chance and hopped on board not only as my first collaborator, but also as my business partner. The website you are currently perusing is thanks, in huge part, to Joe and his array of talents. With someone to help steer the boat, so to speak, the two of us began the process of creating Waterlogged August.
What I had never realized was that in the course of all those family meals that Joe witnessed, he understood how two people could talk to each other about something completely different and still come to the same conclusion. It was therefore beyond fortuitous that Joe would collaborate with me on our first issue. We chose the title of the first issue—Everything We Lost in the Flood—not to be purposely cryptic or ‘artsy,’ but because it presented us with the opportunity to regain something swept away years before either of us had even been born. After all, those mixed and jumbled conversations my grandparents carried on did not come from some proverbial ether; they had lived and breathed our hometown for decades and had, in effect, created a language all their own.
This first issue is our attempt to do the same.
Joe and I have always spoken our own language, and it has always been based on a shared history. When the Flood of 1955 swept away all the photos and memories my family had accrued, what went with it was a basis for my own life, my own history. So I decided I wanted to create my own back-story, my own record of ‘how it had all gone down.’ And Joe, being so instrumental in my life throughout the years, had to be the one to help me pull it all together.
So here it is, our shared history, our confluence of conversation flurrying about the table with seemingly no rhyme or reason appearing until it’s all been said and done. As a progression of events, the photos and words that follow omit more than a little bit of our past. But as a series of guideposts, of streetlights getting us down the road on a thick and tired evening only our hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut could provide, these pages bring us from the beginning to the present in the scattered and various manner my grandparents had tied so eloquently together and passed on to me.
This is our history. And no flood can touch it.
--Dan Cavallari
