How often do you go back and look at your personal progression from child to adult…I mean photographically? Most of us can accept that we have progressed from a dork at some point in our lives….I suppose there are some people out there who are rather self assured that they were born beautiful and have had no other such moments in their lives…but really…take a look back at some point and I’m sure everyone has their “dork phase”.
I’m having a bit of a blast right now sorting through boxes and boxes of old photos and slides of my Dad’s. He moved recently from a house to an apartment and was worried about all the old family photos, particularly the old slides…who looks at slides anymore? So, with trepidation I assured him that I would deal with them…all thirteen boxes of them that my brother is shipping to me one by one….one by one because I just have no room for them all at once living in a one bedroom apartment.
WHAT A BLAST!!
The first few boxes were old photos…that ranged back to the early 70’s! What a fun trip down memory lane. There were pictures of Christmas dinners at Granny and Granddad’s farm, photos of us in the cherry trees and Grandma and Grandpa’s, photos of the old farm house…of which I had none. There were pictures of our old cabin and from the days when we were building it. I remember I was so darned afraid of all the bears when I was little that Dad would plunk me up on one of the front posts….now I look at them and wonder why I felt safe. They seemed so high when I was five! Not so high when I look at them now!
We have had “Slide Night” and have worked out way through two banker boxes of old slides. It’s so hard, you can’t keep everything…and slides of mountains, trees, flowers, moose, deer, bear….they had to go…they could have been anywhere and just don’t warrant keeping. But the people pictures, those were so hard to sort through. Kirk ran the projector and I kept track of which slides to pull. I have a box with about 200 slides that are now awaiting scanning…so much work ahead…good thing my DFO contract came in at a lower value for the fall aqnd I won’t be working full time …of course the PSF contract could fill that in…but we will cross that bridge when it confronts us… And, since our holidays went down the toilet and we didn’t get away for our ten days of boating because I tried to break my ankles (still in pain and feeling like a dork for how I did it…really…what idiot sprains two ankles stepping off a curb!?!!?)…I’ve started the scanning process.
So I have bought a new scanner to deal with the slides. The old one would do slides, but it only processed four at a time, this one will handle 16 at a shot and the colour is better on it. The hardest part is tossing them after they have been digitized….it feels somehow…not that I am remotely religious being a self proclaimed agnostic…but…it still feels somehow sacreligious.I try to convince myself that all the photos are still here…just in digital format and well backed up at least twice…but still…it’s hard to throw out the originals. Everything that is newer I know has been copied and the best photos shared. Dad was always fabulous for that, if a photo was good he made extra copies and made sure everyone had them…so I feel secure in that knowledge at least.
Looking forward to the next boxes…I know there are some very, very old pictures in there that date back to when my grandparents were young…can’t wait to see those again and get them digitized!
Oh yes…but I did find a lot of photos from those “dork phases”…and I had thought I was better at avoiding cameras in the mid 80’s when I went though my “punk/goth phase” …oh…did I really do that to my hair? Oh well…it was the 80’s!