Neighbors capture the spirit of Chuck Layton in photo album

By STEVE BARNES, Senior writer
First published in print: Thursday, December 25, 2008
timesunion.com

Margo Layton's most cherished Christmas gift this year is also a reminder of her deepest grief.

The gift, a photo album, came earlier this month from Margo's next-door neighbors Frank and Rae Tedeschi. It contains 25 images of flowers, all intimate close-ups, plus one shot of blades of grass heavy with raindrops and another of an unfurling tiny fern. The book ends with a photo that looks heavenward at shirred clouds, their gray mass edged with pinkish gold from an unseen sunset.

For about a year, before Alzheimer's disease robbed him of his mobility and made it unsafe for him to be left unsupervised, Margo's husband, Chuck, was a familiar sight in their Schenectady neighborhood. An old Konica camera in hand, Chuck would snap for hours, zooming in on flowers, grass and birds. A spectacular sky would always bring him outdoors. Though he was essentially unable to communicate because of his rapidly progressing brain disease, he conveyed what he was seeing. "Look," he'd say. "Beautiful."

Everyone but Chuck knew there was no film in the camera. There didn't need to be Alzheimer's prevented him from making a link between the images he thought he was capturing and the photo prints that never resulted and it would have been financially impossible to make all those prints anyway. A lifelong photographer before Alzheimer's, Chuck took the mechanics of the hobby with him into his confused twilight, finding pleasure in the familiar process of seeing beauty, framing it and freezing it with a snap of the shutter.

The photos in the album are not Chuck's; all were taken by Frank Tedeschi, himself a photo buff, and most were shot in Rae Tedeschi's flower garden, site of many an inspiration for Chuck's photos. After Chuck died, on Dec. 5 at age 69, the idea for the book awoke Rae Tedeschi in the middle of the night.

"We'll always remember the summer that a kind and gentle man wandered our neighborhood with a camera, rejoicing in God's creation," the Tedeschis wrote on the album's dedication page, addressed to Margo and her and Chuck's children, Matt and Julie. The dedication continues, "We would like you to think of the enclosed photos as the images Chuck captured for you."

"I sobbed when they gave it to me," says Margo. "It's so thoughtful and so perfect. I still can't look at it without crying."

Chuck and Margo, who celebrated their 40th anniversary in June, met in college in Albany; he was from Colonie, she from the Catskills. Margo saw a tall, strong, handsome young man walking across campus. She said to herself, "I am going to meet that guy." And she did. One of their early dates was to Thacher Park, where Margo, spying a vibrantly hued flower in a ravine, sent Chuck to pick it for her, as she'd never seen a blossom that shade of blue. He returned with the "flower" a Wise potato-chip bag.

"I remember bouncing in from the date and telling my sister, 'I think I love him. He makes me laugh,'?" Margo says.

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