Secret Lives

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.

So I can digitize and index and tag and some shadow we representation of their lives might be preserved and be more accessible than stacks of on viewed albums rotting away in some attic somewhere. But what good is that? It’s the same problem. Stacks of images, most of them really not that interesting,. Who wants to look at that stuff. All those images were used as aids to living memory. The only way I figure I can give them any value is to make them into stories and thus the reason for this blog. But to be preserved, they must be shared. To be shared, they must be interesting. So this is just a froth. Just the most interesting tip of the iceberg. In hopes that somewhere in the infinite blue of the future Internet the stories and images will be sufficiently interesting to get a hit or two.

As I undertake this futile task, this gathering of dust in the wind, it invites self-examination of my own life. And I think of all the things I’ve wanted to do and never done, and as I finish each day with the heavy knowledge that I’ve accomplished so little of what I set out to do in the morning, I see my own time running out. And all the things that have happened to me, photographed or not, are fading even from my own memory. I’ve tried to keep my life as interesting as possible, with mixed success of course. But what I’ve seen and done is not for the history books were printed in any newspapers, far too but now for that I suppose. Which means that to will soon be lost forever unless I write it here.

There will be other content to I suppose, and perhaps this all can lead in directions interesting to any readers I may attract along the way. Let me know what you like and I’ll write more of it. I promise I’ll try to keep the existential dread to a minimum. But promises are made to be broken. You can take that to the grave.