DOCUMENTING MY LIFE PART II, THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Unrelated announcement: How Couples Resolve the Thermostat Wars & Other Domestic Battles

Sometimes I think my memories are based solely on photographs. My kids won’t forget anything the way they record themselves every time they change clothes, then post and tag the results on Facebook.  Come to think of it, I’m not in a high percentage of those photos, so how much in the way of our times together will they recall when they’re my age?

chillin’

That raises the whole question of making memories. Unlike my kids who would like to vacation in St. Lucia, I prefer to be home, all of us hanging out, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing Boggle, cooking and watching movies, biking, walking the dog, reading or just chillin’.

Will it all blur into one moment of time for my daughters when they tell their grandkids what times with Ma were like?

Recently I went through photographs from my trip to Europe at age 23.  I remember the faces of those kids I hung out with on the Costa Brava so clearly, but not their names, nor their nationalities.  I think we sat around a lot, but that’s probably because it’s what my Kodak film captured.

That was July, 1969 when the first men had landed on the moon.  I do recall one undocumented moment from that summer. I awoke in my pensione room and heard voices outside my door exclaim, “There are people on the moon!” And I thought, “Wow, Americans landed on the moon and found people up there!”

Not documenting may pose a problem for me, but documenting can be a greater problem. How do I organize all my journals and snapshots I’ve generated? I still haven’t put photos in the album I bought 20 years ago for the pictures from my marriage 31 years ago to a man I divorced 12 years ago.

Though digital pictures take up less space than snapshots, every time I go to press the button on my digital camera, I hesitate, thinking here’s one more photo to go in with the organizational mess of thousands.

So to document or not to document?  Either way, it’s stressful. But then again, either way there’s some relief!

How important is documenting your life to you, how do you do it and how on earth do you organize it?

Here’s are links to related posts: ORGANIZING MY LIFE PART I, THE JOURNAL and PHOTOPHOBIA.

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