I have a secret under the stairs. A stack of boxes full of photos and photo albums, film reels of super-8 kodachrome, tintypes and daguerreotypes going back 150 years. Lifetimes of memories memories lost , now mostly indecipherable. As I shuffle through the stacks of old memories, I see the hands of my ancestors, perhaps just a note scrawled on the back of a photograph or names carefully written out in scratchy ink pens on these group portraits, but mostly unidentified, mostly forgotten, and soon mostly to be unknown. I’ve undertaken the task to digitize these images to preserve them before I throw them away. It is truly a hopeless task. I can see the hands of my ancestors who’ve attempted to organize and to memorialize those they once loved and knew so well. All have failed. The task is overwhelming. And besides the memories that they treasure in those images are unrecoverable as their own memories are lost from living memory as their own memories become history. A few months ago I lost my aunt to Mattel at age 90 zillion years. She’s the last of the old-timers. Now it’s only my older brother war and, age 69, who is the oldest in our line.