Why?

Heading Out

 

My last Microsoft ten computer crashed. I still have my laptop and I have been surviving with it while I made up my mind about trying an iMac. And figuring out whether I wanted to transfer all my old photo files once again from the cloud to McMac. Meanwhile I casually asked the local computer guy if he could just copy the hard drive to an external one and he did.

It was then I remembered the trunk of photos in my mother's basement. Of all her age relatives she was the one with the space for storing the family's history. And it was there my sister and I discovered the trunk after Mom's death. It was too heavy to lift and locked. We managed to pick that and found it full to the brim of Kodak black and white prints of complete strangers.

My mother once had photo books she had carefully arranged photos in. Attaching them with those cute corners you licked in exactly the right place to slip the image into. And she would use a white or silver ink to label under each photo on the black paper the pertinent information: Jack and Jill Christmas 1955, etc. But not these in the trunk. Mom had no hand in these. Nor were they any Dad took. He did slides so they could be theater on family gatherings. My brother took the family history in carousel after carousel of slides and the projector. His wife promised to go through them and copy the best for the rest of the family. That never happened.

I doubt the slides exist. An artist friend shared that her kodachrome slides faded to green and then a pale pink and then vanished. All her European travels vanishing into ether. I have boxes of slides kept in a cool spot upstairs I have not looked at for years. Same era, different travels, but they are probably the same. I should go look. Debbie and I looked at the photos in the trunk. Just tossed there. Helter skelter in no order. On some Kodak furnished a faint date of processing. On most even that was not apparent. Before color. Or at least before black and white film became more expensive and harder to find than color. Debbie summed it up by saying, "the Beverly Hillbillies before Beverly." Obviously it was not just my father who had a history we never talking about. So why keep the trunk and all those ghosts in the basement.

The estate sales agent wanted them. She said there are a lot of collectors who pay for a fake history. Given the real estate where the trunk resided we paid a lot to hide it. I have paid a lot to preserve my images in the cloud well past the time I knew I would never be Ansel Adams or R.C. Gorman. The expensive cloud did not even preserve it correctly. I cannot find 2021 or 2022. I hope they are on the hard drive sitting beside me. My trunk. And most of them are unlabeled, and if those in the cloud are any example, not even dated correctly.

So why keep that trunk in the basement or mine in the external hard drive?