Preserving the Past

So what does one do on a snow day? Well, besides watch Martha and eat grilled cheese sandwiches. One of the more productive things I found to do in the late afternoon was to scan pictures.

Think about it. Back before there were digital cameras, we actually had to take snapshots, and then take the rolls of film to the nearest drug store, wait almost a week for them to be developed, and then we stuck them in a photo album to drag out whenever we had guests. Or how about your third-grade class photo, the one where you were missing a front tooth and there was a gap in your bangs where you had tried to cut your hair yourself? Or your mom and dad's wedding picture?

Now we have boxes and envelopes and albums full of family photographs, and those hardly ever see the light of day now, because we're all enamored with the prospect of digital immediate gratification.

I have a box of photos going back to high school, and I also inherited a couple of the family photo albums a few years ago. The kind of albums where black-and-white photos are stuck to heavy black paper with photo corners. And it's scary that those photos, beside memories or the memories of relatives who were there, are the only proof those days even existed. If something happened to those pictures, they're gone forever.

So I spent the afternoon, scanning photographs if no other reason than to preserve them (assuming my computer doesn't crash again). And a quite of few of those photos deserve posts of their own.

So here you go. Skipper: The Early Years.

That's me in the sailor hat. And I wonder where my uniform fetish comes from.