Some of you may have received an old photo or two from me via email in the past couple of weeks. If you haven’t, yet, don’t despair. It could mean that I tried but your email provider stripped them because they were too big or too embarrassing, or it could mean that my image in your photo made me look too fat or too goofy, or maybe I just don’t have any photos of you (in which case, where have you been hiding?).
The reason for the old pictures? It first started when Cyndi and I decided to build a new house and then Cyndi said we should clean out all the back-shelf boxes we’ve accumulated since 1982. In his book Soul Salsa, Leonard Sweet wrote, “The more you live in place, the more your space becomes silted with artifacts.” He wrote that about us. Twenty-six years of living in the same house has produced a lot of artifacts, and digging through the piles is a bit like archeology.
Some of our artifacts are shoe boxes full of photos. Holiday photos and race photos and family reunion photos and little kids (were our children ever that small?) in the backyard with our pet rabbits photos and church group photos and piano recital photos and horseback-riding and chore-doing photos and aerobics photos and vacation photos and church ski photos and band trip photos and high school graduation photos, and I guess I shouldn’t go on and on about this but, some of you are in some of those photos.
The other reason I’ve been sending photos by email is that my friend and personal computer wizard, Frank, replaced my ancient 5-year-old printer with a combination printer-scanner-copier and now I can scan old photos more often and much easier.
The thing is, even bad photos, and by bad photos I mean crooked or out-of-focus or finger-in-the-nose or eyes-closed, have a story behind them. And it’s hard to throw away a story. It’s pretty easy to throw away a poorly taken photo, but if that photo is a link to a story I want to remember, I’ll keep the picture every time. I’m afraid of losing my stories.
Last summer I scanned old family pictures with the intent of printing digital photo albums to give to our now-grown-up kids. It isn’t easy to show pictures when the only place they reside is on a computer. Passing around a laptop is not the same as passing around a family photo album.
I scanned a lot of pictures, but I haven’t yet published them in a book. I didn’t know if I should group them by event, or by chronology, or by person. (If you have any suggestions, let me know.) And now, with our current archeological project underway, I have even more pictures to scan.
I guess the remainder of my summer will be a long dig through more and more old boxes, which means, more and more stories.
Sweet wrote, “Stories sanctify space. If those artifacts come without stories or purpose, no matter how beautiful or expensive they may be, you are turning your home into a garbage dump.” He suggested getting rid of anything that doesn’t have a story attached.
When we first moved into this house in 1982 we weren’t old enough, we didn’t have enough accumulated history between us, to follow the only-keep-things-if-they-have-a-story rule. But that is no longer true. Nowadays, we have lots of stuff and lots of history and lots of stories. It’s harder to justify keeping something just because it’s pretty. It needs a story.
Why are stories so important? Because it’s our stories that tell us who we are; knowing who we are is hard because we’re constantly changing.
In one of my favorite movies – Joe verses the Volcano – Joe Banks, a man who has lost track of himself, asked Marshall, his chauffeur, where he should go shopping for clothes. Marshall stopped the car and said, “You say to me you want to go shopping, you want to buy clothes, but you don’t know what kind. You leave that hanging in the air, like I’m going to fill in the blank; that to me is like asking me who you are, and I don’t know who you are. I don’t want to know. It’s taken me my whole life to find out who I am, and I’m tired now, you hear what I’m saying?”
Marshall was right: it takes our whole life to find out who we are. But it isn’t about clothes; it’s about our stories.
So I don’t know what I’ll do with these boxes of old photos. I suspect I’ll scan some to email, probably mail a few analog copies to friends, and put the rest back in the shoe boxes and on a shelf in our new house. The stories they tell are too loud to throw away.
