Scanning One's Life

Scanning One's Life

We are not the most orderly family. Mismatched dishes are stacked somewhat haphazardly in our cupboards. Bills have more than one place in which they collect waiting to be paid. Mail in general, along with the New York Times down at the end of our driveway, can pile up, so that three or four day’s worth of news is usually brought into the house to be read at once in a bit of catch-up mode, not to mention that we occasionally have to pry the overstuffed mail from our mailbox, a habit that eventually so loosened our mailbox that we had to install a new one on the other side of the driveway. Given that our friend/photographer had some technical glitches when recording our wedding, we never did put together a wedding album, and each year, we promise friends and family that we’ll get out a Xmas card—it’s happened once.

Photos, at least the ones that have not made it into the half-dozen or so photo albums we’ve periodically got interested in filling up, or that are in frames around the house, are mostly stuffed into boxes in a hutch, hidden away like some family secret we’re somehow ashamed of. There is no shame here; in fact, quite the opposite. The only shame is in us not having better organized all these photos for easier viewing. There is certainly no chronological order in which they’ve been put away, which made recently reviewing them (for the purposes of scanning them digitally so that they could rest on the family computer) something of a random, and overwhelming experience.

My wife and daughters bought me a scanner this past Xmas. And given this general disorganization of our lives (maybe just my life), the scanner sat in its box, underneath the coffee table, for almost two months before Hailey, our sixteen-year-old, was the one who took it out of the box and set it up for us. (I do want to say, in our defense, lest you get the impression that we are the most slothful, procrastinating family on the planet, that we got rid of our Christmas tree shortly after New Year’s and put all of the ornaments away neatly so that they will be much easier to locate next year.)

Still, just how long the new scanner would have sat under the coffee table if my daughter hadn’t taken this step is anyone’s guess. Given how easy and quick it was to scan prints into digital images once she had set it up (that could then rest neatly in I-photo, for storage, to e-mail to others, or to make simple dissolving slide shows with cool tunes to provide a soundtrack) it became hard to resist diving into the hutch and beginning such a project. It’s somewhat addictive. So easy to do just one, and then one, and then one more; particularly inviting when one is waiting for a wife to get ready to leave the house, waiting for coffee to be made, a meal to cook, and certainly more useful than checking e-mail or browsing facebook.

And here I thought we never took any photos. Oh my God. What didn’t we record? And who was doing all that recording, anyway? Me, I guess, except for the photos that I was also in when, of course, someone else must have been behind the camera—my wife, one assumes. There are hundreds and hundreds of family photos. And going through them all is something of a time travel machine. Pull out one photo and you get my wife and I in a carriage in New York City waving to friends and family as we pull away from our wedding day. Pull out another and you’ll find our oldest daughter’s birthday party from when she was eight. . . . nine? Pull out another, and there we are in Spain, just a year ago, with this same daughter now fully grown—a year away from going to college.

So many overwhelming feelings come up from such random plucking, the most obvious and banal being—where has all the time gone and I don’t remember ever looking that good; the old adage, if you don’t like the photo that was just taken of you, wait five years, certainly does apply here. Other more subtle and confusing emotions, however, also rise to the surface. And like the photos themselves, bubble up in no particular order: where was I during all that time? Not literally where was I because I can see from the photos where I was. I was here, or rather there, in those houses, bedrooms, soccer fields, beaches and cities, in the land of our past lives, all our past lives, spending all this time with my family, but remembering so little of it, the small, daily moments, or even the bigger on-some-memorable-family-trip ones. 

Were our children really this exuberant and happy growing up, and if so, we must have done a pretty darn good job of this parenting thing, after all. One does wonder why there aren’t more friends around—the photos of others, friends, other family members, other people’s children, while occasionally abundant in bunches—a trip or two here and there—in general seem suspiciously scarce. And few friends have remained constant, less than a handful, and not many new friends have replaced those old ones who have drifted away—maybe because we never sent out Christmas cards to any of them. We also definitely took a lot more photos when we were on trips and in warmer weather than at home and in colder climate. With the exception of a mind-numbing number of Xmas photos, the slideshow of our lives consists of far more sunny, warm days than cold, cloudy ones. Ice cream is being consumed. Bikes are out and about. Blueberries are being picked. Soccer is being played. Hikes are being taken. Kids have found pools and lakes and quarries in which to cool off in.

At around two hundred photos scanned so far, and many, many more boxes to get through, it does seem like it would be a good idea to occasionally stop all this scanning (or skimming over one’s life) and examine a few photos throughout this journey in a bit more depth—my own version of remembrance of things past, using a few photos to prompt such recollections. When was that taken? And what was going on before and after it was taken? What was happening in our lives at that moment? And what does it mean, if anything, in the larger context of our lives, still ongoing, of course, still being recorded, whether we’re realizing it or not, still being mostly forgotten.