Ab SchSince I moved out last year I intermittently visit my parents to collect my old things. These are things that I’d forgotten and things that I didn’t realize I would need (metal tongs are potentially one of the most versatile kitchen implements ever).
Like every time I cleaned out the boxes, I became distracted — this time with shoeboxes filled with photos of my parents in the early 90s. There were candid photos at parties, group photos, pictures of thumbs, and even a pre-smartphone selfie or two. The photos were imperfect, yet the flaws told me a story about people who I never knew my parents were. If anything, the flaws in the frames added to the character of the photos.
Digging through my parents’ old memories made me think about what pictures I had taken in the last year. I have a 16mp camera on a phone that can store hundreds of high definition pictures on an internal memory, but I couldn’t find 10 pictures on my phone worth developing or even saving to a hard disk to show for a year’s worth of memories. There were selfies, and poses, pictures of dents on my car, and of a car that had parked in my spot, but nothing that I really felt that could help my summarize a year.
My real camera gets a little more love, only when I’m on vacation, and rarely when I’m in Edmonton. I’m hesitant to take out my phone and snap pictures when the moment doesn’t feel right, yet when the moment feels right I tell myself to enjoy the moment instead of taking a picture.
I don’t have a journal or a diary and I’ve never really been able to commit to that part of a daily routine. I fill in the gaps with pictures of trips and events. I find that for myself at least, pictures can at times capture a moment better than my pen can, so much so that I have to sift through my ever-expanding drop box account to find photos of my first year in university just to better remember the times (there are photos of worn out tennis shoes, a bad haircut, and girls were still a mystery). I like to think that I’ve swapped the tennis shoes for a better sense of self, but I need to remind myself of those previous times to appreciate the present.
If I’m going to make a New Year’s resolution for this year, it’s that I’m going to take the time to better keep the memories of this year. The pictures of my parents in those faded Costco envelopes were probably the closest I’ll come to being able to jump back to decades and helped me to learn more about parents that I’ve never bothered to really talk to. Likewise, I’ll take photos now to remind my future self of what I am now. I won’t only make memories but I’ll also record them. It’s one thing to live life behind the lens, it’s another thing to forgo the lens altogether.
