Photo Conundrum

Sometimes I wonder how I get myself into these ridiculous situations. On this most recent trip to Idaho, I decided to appoint myself Family Records Keeper, and embark on a colossal and somewhat asinine project. I brought all of the old family photo albums back home with me telling everyone that I would transform myself into Super Scrapbook Woman and re-do the albums complete with commentary about the photos. I will now go into the corner and put the “Fucking Idiot” sign around my neck.

Just thumbing through them in a quick once over I can tell this project is going to be maddening and life consuming, and I don’t know if I’m the right person to take it on. I am only ¾ of the way finished with my wedding album, and half way finished with Rachael’s baby book. I told myself when Rachael was born that I would keep a journal of daily activities that we did together when she was young, and that lasted a whole three weeks. Thank G-d for digital cameras or we would have an enormous crate of little, black, plastic tubes containing undeveloped film documenting the first couple of years of her life.

Why put myself through this? Because, sadly enough, I am the last person left with a memory of what these photos are about and who is in them. There are the easy ones with my sister, brother, me and various members of my immediate family, but there are a bunch of hard ones with faces that I vaguely have names to match them to. I remember a lot of the backgrounds and circumstances under which most of these photos were taken, because I used to look through these albums regularly when my mother was alive and would always ask her to explain them. She would get annoyed, but would do it anyway, probably to ensure that I would memorize her spin on our past as she wanted it remembered as opposed to how it really happened.

Aside from the commentary, I have to get new albums in general. Most of the photos are housed in those awful albums that had the flypaper-like adhesive on white cardstock with the plastic film that supposedly protected the pictures. No matter how careful you were or how many times you tried, you could never get the air bubbles out of that plastic! Who knew that 25 years later, the adhesive would turn a gross shade of puke yellow and refuse to hold the photos in place, while that flimsy piece of plastic would just hang out of the album or go missing completely. Not only do I have to figure out a way to get the photos that still stick to the cardstock unstuck in order to place them on kinder, gentler preservation paper, but I have to play detective and figure out what loose photos go with what album.

To keep me on my toes, I also schlepped home a small bag of loose photos, some of which are very old. One has a picture of my grandmother with her family members. My Grammy is in her 30s, and has all of the family members listed on the back of the photo; she just didn’t bother to say who was who. If there is one plea I can make to anyone reading it is: label your pictures in detail! Some day you will be old and your memory will be gone, and your confused kids will have to try and figure out which one of the old guys is Uncle Harry, and if one of them is Uncle Harry, who the hell is the other old guy.

Going through old pictures can also bring up some uncomfortable memories, like the ones I found from my first wedding. I don’t mind the posed ones of me standing next to my ex and the wedding party, but there was one of me and the ex kissing, and considering that he liked to go both ways (a fact which was revealed to me after we had been married awhile), I found the kissing picture to be a little yucky. There were a few pictures of me with old boyfriends, but I don’t mind those ones so much, although I do wonder what the hell attracted me to those guys in the first place.

I’m sure throughout the duration of this project I will have a lot of emotions that play out especially given the fact that I don’t really know if the past my mother dictated to me was the past as it actually happened. Maybe the commentary I end up writing will just be more of her fiction, then again, perhaps I will figure out more about who I am. Either way, I have promised my brother, sister, and stepdad each fresh albums with copies of all the pictures and commentary documenting when the photos were taken and the circumstance surrounding them. Hopefully, unlike Rachael’s baby book, this album project will be done in a timelier manner.