Throwing Away the Past

Have you ever found a pair of ticket stubs to a concert you went to a quarter-century ago when cleaning out an old drawer?  You hold in your hand proof that you were somewhere in the past at a certain time, and even what building, row and seat, and what you heard for a few hours.  Do you save the ticket stubs or toss them?  Maybe you could jot the info down in a journal, or make an entry into Facebook Timeline.  If you don’t, you’re throwing the past away.

I often throw my past away, and sometimes I regret it.  Saving the past takes work.  I turned 60 last year and my memory is in decline, so I often wish I had validation for lost memories.  But saving the past often feels like hoarding, and hoarding scares me because the weight of past can become paralyzing.  Some folks bury themselves in the past long before they die.

Most people don’t have eidetic memories.  Have you ever wondered how biographers could write gigantic biographies of people who lived a hundred or two hundred years ago?  George Washington and Abraham Lincoln left big historical trails to follow, but most people leave few clues to piece together.  My father died when I was 19 and it took me years to realize that I knew nothing about him.  I had memories and a handful of photos, which I thought was all I needed, but when I finally got around to examining those memories I realized I had zip, nada, nothing.  I have no idea what was going on inside his head.  Like, what was he thinking on his graduation day in the photo above?  What did he hope to get out of life?

Recently I threw out decades of credit card bills, medical statements, receipts on big purchases, bank statements.  I knew if I wanted to I could recreate at least my spending and medical history with those clues, but in the end, I chose to throw them all away.

Who are we?  Are we what we think?  Are we what we own?  Are we what we did?  Are we what we love?  Are we what we hate?  I’m not a believer in the afterlife, but I wonder what it would be like, because if we went some place new do we throw out who we were on Earth?  Memories of my Dad are defined by Camel cigarettes and Seagram 7 bottles.  If my Dad can’t have his cigs and booze, can he be my Dad in heaven?  Or do they have bars and ashtrays on the other side?

And is that how the young man in the photo above expected to be remembered?  By his bad dying habits?

There was a period in my life where I fanatically collect LPs.  I had over a thousand of them.  Collecting and listening to music is what made my life good and meaningful.  I eventually sold or gave them all alway.  I only have one LP now.  Last year I had a fit of nostalgia for an album I heard in 1971 called Never Going Back to Georgia by The Blues Magoos.  It was never reprinted on CD.  I ordered a used copy off the internet and a friend gave me a turntable and I played that album a couple of times.   What I heard was not what I remembered from forty years ago.

It takes a great effort to recapture the past once you throw it away.  I know many people who never throw anything a way.  I knew a guy who claimed he had every book he ever bought and read.  I know that’s not true because he lent me a book and I never gave it back, and I’m sure I’m not the first.  I have a piece of his past – sorry about that Bob.  But is it a piece that matters?  And which pieces do?

Does the past matter?  I can go long periods of time without thinking about the past, but boy do I hate it when a memory pops up and I can’t place when and where I was.  It bums me out that I can’t remember one face or name from kindergarten through third grade.  I do remember returning to Lake Forest Elementary in my fourth grade year and meeting a girl name Helen and how it upset her that I didn’t remember knowing her from when we went to second grade together.  I can remember a few people from 5th and 6th grade.  That’s pitiful, ain’t it?  In all my K-12 years I can barely remember and name more than a dozen classmates.  Where did all those people go, I spent years with them.

Religious people agonize over being reborn after death – they just don’t want to let go, they’re just afraid of dying.  But I think we die every day, every moment, I think we’re constantly throwing away the past.  We’re new people every day.  We go to sleep every night and our brains housecleans the day’s memories and throws out most of them.  If we kept all our memories we’d be like hoarders buried under piles of useless crap.

But each night, and maybe not every night, the old noggin decides to keep a few bits of the past, so there’s a precedence for keeping some stuff.  I wish I had kept a diary and took more photographs throughout my life.  A case could be made that we should each be our own biographer, and maybe that’s the right amount of past to keep, what we could keep in one big book.  Our brains aren’t very good with details, so we should jot the important ones down and take a few snaps to document our lives.

Now here’s my wish.  I wish The Library of Congress would create a national digital archive where we could store our memoires, like a permanent blogging site that historians can depend on for mining memories about all of us.  I know most of our autobiographies will go unread, but they’d be there.  I’d love to read my father’s thoughts, and his father’s, and his father’s father, and so on.

There are things we do want to remember.  Most of the past we throw away, but maybe we should start throwing away a little less.

JWH – 3/16/12

How to Organize and Store Photographs???

I have stacks of photo albums, boxes of loose photos, pictures framed on the walls and standing around as knickknacks, gigabytes of digital photos, photos stuck in books, pics left in drawers and stuck to the refrigerator, and who knows where else.  And like most people, if my house burned down I think I would morn the photos the most.  I have family photos going back 90 years.

Not only that, I have many sets of digital photos because I keep backing them up to multiple devices.  This might sound good, but I no longer know which set is the master set, and I’m not sure if any one set of digital photos is a complete set.  I put Picasa on my computer and it found zillions of photos on two internal drives and one external, but so far I haven’t found out how to use it to organize my photo collection.  I also have three more external hard drives that I used with my last four computers that also have caches of photographs.

And if my house burned down or got blown away by a tornado, all my digital copies wouldn’t help me because they are all at the house.  Sensible people scan all their photos and then back them up to online backup sites.  I was doing that until Mozy wanted to quadruple my yearly fee and I had to cancel my account.  So I’m thinking of new ways to get a handle on my photo collection that keeps multiplying like Tribbles.

However, it’s an enormous task and I’m big fat lazy person.  When I wrote the title of this post it wasn’t because I was offering authoritative answers, but because I’m looking for advice.  I want to spend some time here and think about the best way to solve this problem and hopeful get some useful suggestions.

I’ve been researching fireproof boxes and safes but I don’t know if that’s the answer.  Common fireproof boxes and safes aren’t suitable for photographs and negatives.  Most professional photographers recommend media safes, which are expensive.  Some people recommend bank safety deposit boxes, but other people don’t recommend them because even they aren’t completely trustworthy.  In other words there is no real guarantee of protecting your photographs, just various levels of precaution.

We’re living in a digital age so I’m going to go with digital protection.  I love my old photos that look old, but they look old because they are deteriorating from fading and discoloring.  I figure the oldest of the photos I might put in a fireproof box or get a safety deposit box, but the first thing I want to do is get them all scanned and copies given to my relatives.

The biggest problem I see facing digitizing my photo collection is how to organize the files.  What good is thousands of pictures with cryptic names filed away in a confusion of folder names?  I have lots of folders that say things like Washington trip (but there were two) and Snow Days (of which there were many).

When my mother died we had a slideshow at her funeral that I prepared.  Putting it together made me realize that I think organizing pictures by people might be a good organizing principle.  It was fun trying to find all the photos I could of my mother and then ordering them chronologically.  That’s very hard to do when people don’t write dates and locations on the back of  the pictures, but with detective work and the memory of many it can be done.

But this solution isn’t perfect because most photos have more than one person in them.  My solution to this was to repeat photos in each folder.  For instance I have a folder for my mother Virginia Little Harris and my dad George Delaney Harris.  Now I could have made another folder for Mom and Dad together, but it seemed redundant because if you look at each of their folders you see all their together photographs.

My first solution was to make folders for all of our photos which would be a massive collection:

• 2 folders – couple
• 4 folders – parents
• 8 folders – grandparents
• 32 folders – great grandparents
• Many folders for aunts and uncles, and great variations
• Many many folders for cousins of various generations
• Many folders for friends
• Many folders for pets
• Many folders for houses
• Vacations

I then decided we should divide the work and keep our families separate and each person would have a genealogy of photos:

• Top Level Person
• Spouses
• Parents
• Aunts and Uncles
• Cousins
• Grandparents
• Great Grandparents
• Friends
• Pets
• Objects (houses, cars, schools, etc.)
• Vacations

So for my household we’d have two main collections:

/photos/jim/subfolders

/photos/susan/subfolders

That’s pretty manageable, and it divides up the work, and we can easily separate out folders to give away to our individual relatives.

The next step is ordering the photos within a folder.  Personal I like order them by year.  I’m very time oriented.  I like seeing pictures of people from when they were born till they die.  But to do this you have to name the photos by year, like “1928-04 Dad and great grandfather” or “1940s – xxx” or “1957g – xxxx.”   I use g for guess.  I’d love to know exactly when a photo was taken so I could prefix it with YEAR-MO-DA, but that seldom happens.

Of course this scheme fails miserably if you’re an art photographer and take pictures of everything under the sun.  Hell, how does a photographer of nude women organize their files?  Where’s that photo of the brunette with a emerald stud in her navel?  But hell, I can’t worry about such mind bending problems since my task is to organize family photos.

My mother put most of her photos in albums that have begun eating the photos, so my first step was to convert all these albums to archival quality albums.  That took days, but the process was personally transformative.  Looking at family photos for days on end conjured up endless forgotten memories.  This was a rather philosophical experience.  Each photo triggered a memory, or emotion, or a thought about a dead person or people I haven’t seen in years – and I looked at hundreds of them and that had impact.  The whole experience also instilled a desire to know my family better, but also made me wonder about that old saying, “blood is thicker than water.”  Blood ties me to so many people I never knew or know little, so just how important is my genetic connections?

When I was in my twenties I decided I didn’t want to be the kind of person that looked backwards, so I threw all my photos and mementos away.  And even though I had been into photography enough  to have a darkroom, I stopped taking pictures.  And for many years I didn’t own a camera.  And I’ve known other people that don’t like taking photos.  They want to just experience the moment without always trying to record it.  Now that I’m older I realize that isn’t a good plan.  Memory is a piss poor way to recall the past.  Living in the now means only having the now.  I’m older, and naturally looking backwards, and I have very few clues to help me see how things unfolded.  Luckily, other people took photographs, and my wife remembers much better than I do.

Organizing photographs has also become organizing memories, which leads to philosophical observations.  Life is very short and fleeting when all you can find of your past is a 25-30 images of yourself taken over 59 years of life.  One thing that’s amusing is I spend a lot of time on this blog remember when I first started reading science fiction, so I tried to find a photo from 1964 when I discovered the books of Robert A. Heinlein that have remained so memorable to me.  Here’s one that might be from that time, and a recent photo.  It’s hard to believe that so much of my mental kid world from 1964 is still surviving in the old bald head of the 2011 me.  By the way, my big fat head is blocking the view of the 12 Heinlein YA novels I ordered directly from Charles Scribners in 1967, that I first read in 1964 and bought with my first paycheck when I got a job at 16.

JWH – 3/16/11