Photographic Memories

I pulled maybe forty photographs out of five or six photo albums, scanned them for a family project, and then realized I did not note out of which album I had pulled them.

If I had proper, chronologically ordered photo albums this would not have been a problem. I could have popped them back in in their proper chronological order. However, my photo albums have grown wild and weedy over the years, with some starting before I was born and then skipping to the early Dean years, and some focusing mainly on bad pictures I took as a teenager and college student. Others have been limited to pictures that can fit certain sizes, which mean they are a bit of a grab bag.

The old "magnetic" (where "magnetic" meant "sticky") photo albums had an advantage in that you could put any size photos in them side-by-side. Now that the photos we placed so artfully in those either fell out into a pile when the "magnetism" failed, or have been eaten by toxic glue, we now have the "sleeve" style photo albums, which are either made for 4 x 6 sizes or 3 x 5. But not both if you happen to have both types of photos in the same general time period.

Whoops, that got sleep-inducing.

So I had a pile of photos. I filled all the obviously empty spots and still had a dozen or so photos. And in the process, two "magnetic" photo albums had fallen apart in my hands, and I had to "rescue" the photos and toss the old albums. I ended up slipping all of them into either a 4 x 6 sleeve album or a 3 x 5 sleeve album (that means more old photos in the back of the newest ones in our collection).

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you look through my photo albums, it will be a bit of a 52-card pick-up, which I'm just going to say makes it a more exciting experience. Because there is no way I'm spending a week of my life re-ordering and re-album-ing them. My posterity isn't worth it. And my posterior would object.