Slightly Off the Grid

Why do people sigh when they say, “I really need to go through my photos?”

Because there are so many.

Two recent incidents have sent me weeding through old photos. I’m talking about hard copy photos. The digital cloud is an entirely different problem. The boxes, drawers, and albums of real pictures are disorganized and cluttering up valuable space. Making it worse is that the old-time developed photos were often printed in double sets so that one could share, except that one only ended up sharing a few special ones. The duds that I could not delete on a roll of actual film now take up double space in shoe boxes in a closet. And I swear the pairs are reproducing like rabbits.

The first incident directing me to my photos involves a picture of my husband taken when he was in high school. In this iconic photo, the thin teenage version of the man I married has thick, wavy hair falling over his eyes. He wears a white teeshirt, hip-hugging jeans and a thick leather belt. He holds in his bare hands a long, thick, curling black snake. He looks like an Abercrombie model.

This photo so impressed our daughters that our youngest took a copy of it to college and tacked to her bulletin board. Her friends were dismayed to discover that the sexy photo model was the same person as the middle aged dad moving in his daughter’s stuff.

Oldest daughter has now decided that she wants that image as a screen saver on her phone, but we don’t know where it is. Since we would never have thrown it out, it must be in the collection of photos I have amassed in my lifetime. It must be found.

The second incident spurring my deep dive into photos came from our oldest grandson, who happens to be the same age as his grandfather in the Abercrombie photo. Grandson was interviewing his great-grandmother for a school project and saw photos of his grandfather as a little boy.

“I’ve never seen pictures of PopPop when he was little,” he said.

Why is that?

Because PopPop’s mother, age 98, still possesses his childhood photos.

I decide that my daughters need to take possession of their childhood photos and not have to wait a hundred years before that happens.

Piles of photos litter the floor of my office. I sort them into piles. Now, there are many ways to organize photos. Chronological order often makes the most sense. However, anyone who has ever had to cull pictures for a photo collage for a wedding or funeral will understand the benefits of a thematic approach to photo organization.

Each daughter gets her own pile.

Grandchildren get a collective pile.

I get my own pile. Lest you find that narcissistic (in an age of selfies), there were hardly any photos with me in my daughter’s wedding collage because no one could find any because guess who took all the pictures of my daughter growing up? Well, lo and behold, I have found some pictures of me. And, dang, did I look good. Too bad I didn’t realize it at the time.

I have another pile of old relatives that only I know the names of. (It’s not an actual pile of old relatives; it’s a pile of pictures.) As I delve into genealogy, knowing the identities of photo subjects becomes very important. Are those three pictures of the same person at different ages, or are they three different people? And why did old people all look the same? Is that my grandfather’s mother or my grandmother’s mother? While I ponder, do I really look as old as my grandmother in this photo of her at my age?

I find it critical now to label photos of my husband and me because otherwise we won’t be able to determine where we were in the photo. Or which year. A random photo of us in a restaurant with a stone wall in the background could be anywhere. Except that I know it was on a trip somewhere special, probably in Europe. Sometime between 2002 and 2017. That narrows things down.

You start to see the rabbit hole of a project this is becoming. For every trip down Memory Lane, I stop to label the photo. This is going to take an eternity and I’m not even close to considering the digital photos! I suspect that “delete” will be the recurring word for that project. I also suspect that a copy of Abercrombie man is hiding on my computer. Can one get physically lost in a digital cloud? Or do you just get sucked into another time dimension? If I disappear at some point, that’s where I’ll be.

I have seven years before the daughters need photos for our fifty year anniversary party, probably less time for the nonagenarian great-grandmothers, but you never know with old people these days.

No Abercrombie man yet, but I’m still looking. He’s here somewhere. Unless he’s there somewhere.