Photographs And Memories

Those of you of a certain age will know this reference. And was there a high school prom in the late seventies that did NOT have this as a its theme? It was the theme of my senior prom in 1978. I would not usually remember that, except I found the pictures and the invitation today while going through another drawer of stuff.

This 24" x 13" x 10" drawer was filled to overflowing with photos, negatives, 3 1/2" floppies and CD's with .jpg files, and a few other odds and ends of memorabilia. Needless to say, today's 15 minutes actually took five hours. I emptied two photo albums that were not full and tossed them. Blurred photos? Trash. Half a face? Ditto. Twenty-five photos of the Yankee Clipper under sail? All but a few sunk into the garbage bag. Just plain bad pictures? Into the circular file, as we used to say in college. Negatives? No need. We can scan any picture we want a copy of. And who needs duplicate sets of most of the pictures I took over the last 15 years? Buh-bye.

Well, I did keep two copies of a favorite picture of my father and me taken about two years before he died. One will go with other family pictures under the glass top of my dresser. The other went into the pile of "to save" photos.

Sorting through the pictures brought back lots of memories--good, bad, bittersweet...

There were, of course, the pictures of both my junior and senior proms and of the Windjammer cruise Dad and I took in 1991. I watched my brother's kids, now 9, 14, 18 and 19, grow up all over again. I revisited Ireland. There was the last Christmas we brought my Grandmother down from the nursing home. I even found a picture of Tom and me from junior high school, which I managed to leave behind when I went to his place for dinner this evening. (And after dinner we spent time going through old high school yearbooks. It is hard to believe that we have known each other for 40 years!)

Over the last couple of months I have been trying to track down my friend Vicky. Some of the pictures I found this afternoon were of her wedding to Matthew. That was a double trip down memory lane because her wedding in 1993 brought together three of us who had gone to college together in Minnesota. (Victoria Kesler Gullett, if you stumble across this, email me. Please.)

And there were the inevitable pictures of Brian and me from the nearly 11 1/2 years we were together. The hardest ones to sort through were the ones from the cruise we took for our 11th anniversary--3 1/2 months before we separated. But there were happy pictures, too. Brian receiving his Master's Degree. The two of us on my 30th birthday, at various Triangle Community Center events, on vacation...

Once I had them sorted, I checked the backs to make sure I could identify who, what, when and where as much as possible. Those that had no information, I added it. Occasionally, I had to dig out one of my journals or old calendars. In another 50 years, no one may care, but one of my brother's kids may take over my job as family historian and want to know.


The photos are now organized by year and are in one box (the black one). The floppies, CD's and the boxes of slides from my summer in Germany are in another (the blue one). And just for comparison, here are the boxes in the drawer.

At the end of the afternoon, I took one half-full, but heavy, trash bag out to the dumpster. I also reboxed my journals. I had been keeping a couple of archive boxes folded up, again because I thought I would be moving in a year or so. Since I seem to be here for the duration, I might as well use them so that stored things are in identical boxes for easy stacking. When I took the two old boxes out to the dumpster, one of my neighbors asked me for them, because he is packing to move. I also gave them a roll of bubble wrap that was sitting in the back of a closet waiting for the move that has not happened. More stuff out the door!

The few odds and ends that were not pictures all went someplace else. An envelope of letters from my college years went into the appropriate box of journals. Diplomas are now with other important documents. My baby cup and bank sit happily on display with my crystal and Depression Glass collection. A couple of family heirlooms are now stored with the others.

That leaves my baby hairbrush. Do I really need to keep that, Mom?

Peace,
Jeffri