Sorting

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When you're recuperating from an illness, you find yourself with time on your hands. If you're like me, you begin to clean and organize things. Photos and receipts and greeting cards pile up over the months and years, and it's nice to go through them once in a while.

Receipts and greeting cards are easy to throw away, but photos are a little more difficult. I find that I've taken too many overexposed photos of Beautiful Scenery over the years, and it's easy to toss most of them in the trash. When there are people in the photos, however, I hesitate, as if they exert some magical hold on me. Might some hypothetical future descendant muse over these photos, wondering at how distant and mysterious we were?

Well, hm. First of all: what descendants? Apart from a few mangy stuffed animals, I have no kids. I keep in touch with a few members of the next generation of my family, but none of them seems impassioned about family history.

Also, the sad truth is that objects like photos are not generally magical. I pull out old theater stubs and concert programs, examine them with regret, and toss them in the trash. They may have been magical for a little when then they were new, but time has taken their magic away. Photos are a little different, but even they lose their immediacy after a few decades.

How do you react when you see a photo of a distant ancestor? Curiosity, maybe; regret that you will never get to know them; sadness that things pass and people die. I think always of those family-reunion photos in which the kids are lying on the floor up front, clowning for the camera, and the older generations stand ranked behind them, with the oldest of all scrunched against the wall in back. I realized some years ago that (without ever quite realizing it) I had suddenly become one of those pale oldsters in the back of the photo - some forgotten great-uncle, what's-his-name, the one who moved to Rhode Island and lived with another man and had no kids.

Forgotten.

Well, hm.

Get to work sorting and labeling those photos, kids!

Maybe someone will remember you after you're gone.

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