Take A Souvenir

 Every so often I get updates from photo sites that are sharing their space for my memories. The messages tend to come with dates like "Fifteen years ago..." or "Do You Remember?"

And I do. Because at that particular time in history, I chose to pause and take a picture. I paused with the intent of preserving a moment. I am happy that there are vast cyber storehouses keeping all those moments on ice for me until just the right moment to remind me that I wanted to remember. 

That was when my son was ten.

That was when the eucalyptus tree came down on our back fence.

That was when I took one too many pictures of my wife and she gave me that face.

I don't tend to take pictures of every instant of every day just for the sake of documentation. There have been plenty of instances in which I have found myself wondering, "Why didn't we take any pictures of that?" The answer is pretty easy: We were all too busy with whatever was going on to stop and pose. There was no pause button on that day. 

On a bookshelf in our living room, there is one shelf that is entirely devoted to photo albums. Old school. The ones that were carefully arranged and pasted together in very strict chronological order so there would be no confusion as to the order of events. Second birthday before Christmas before third birthday and so on. Each era, event and escapade meticulously filed away. Right up to a certain point. The moment when we went digital. Or nearly. There was a lingering bit there when we were still having our digital pix printed and sent to us by this Internet venture called Snapfish. I got the snap part, but was always a little mystified by the fish. 

But soon we were a fully-web-based family. When something of note occurred, it wasn't official until we uploaded our memory card to the void, or the cloud. Or the fish. For a little while there, I took a lot more pictures of the mundane. They weren't going to charge us for processing or an extra set of prints. They were just bits and bytes. Somewhere inside the cloud/void/fish. It's those moments when I get a reminder from the photo droids that I took this picture of a broken desk. Twelve years ago today. 

Thanks for the memories.