My friends easily recognize Ginger the Wheaten Terrier, and my kids will still know her decades from now when they enter assisted living facilities or join the urban planning staff on the Mars Colony. Ginger has carved her place in Turnerdom.
The classroom in that remodeled McHenry middle school supply room is trickier. About fifty people might recognize that one, and only a couple of them are part of my social media network. The Parkland School connections are tenuous now.
My brother has been sending me old pictures from our family’s past and various souls in those pics will likely forever remain mysterious.
I recognize my dad on the left, my grandma next to dad, my grandpa next to her, and that might be my Aunt DeLois in front of grandpa. But who are the strangers on the right? They are suspected of being “Galbreaths.”
I have boxes and boxes of pictures. Already, some elementary school names have slipped away from me. I was never good with names.
Readers! Do you have similar picture boxes? This is a great time to open up the boxes and start writing names on the backs of those pictures. It may also be time to cull the boxes. All those pictures of grassy hills and pretty nice mountains? Do you need twenty pictures of a pretty nice mountain that you’re almost sure were taken on that driving trip through Colorado. Unless it was Uncle Lester’s birthday in in West Virginia…
My brother-in-law recently remarked that he had disposed of his scenery pictures. “All that stuff is online if I want to look at it,” he said.
I am not sure I entirely agree. Memory is triggered by pictures and absent those pictures, I might never think of that classroom in McHenry, which I loved despite the fact that it was an interior room with no heating, or cooling, and a shortage of outlets. I remember that white, cinderblock room and those kids with love. But some of my mountain pics can definitely go.
I don’t know about you, reader, but having paid to have those pictures developed, I tended to keep them. They had cost me maybe fifteen cents apiece! Or more! O.K., my picture hoarding may have been irrational, but the fact remains that I have taken a lot of lousy pictures in my life and no one will be the worse for me transferring them to the Underdog waste paper basket beside me. I have demonstrated that I can take dark, fuzzy pictures of strangers beside random, tall buildings in unknown cities. Now maybe it’s time I demonstrate that I can throw those pics away. I mean, honestly, with all the resources of the FBI, I doubt we could identify a number of these shapeless forms.
Biojar suggestion: If you are wondering what to do., maybe it’s a good day to pull down the picture boxes?
