Yesterday’s blog provided the opportunity to pull a few photos out of the dusty home in which they lived. Actually I’m exaggerating as the photos had been digitized this summer when Bec had packed up her Virginia home but you get my point. At one point, they had been a picture on a piece of photographic paper.

On Sunday, Bec enjoyed going through her paper memories, and began sending them to me via email. I was thrilled and delighted to be able to look at our kids with my mom and dad back in some of our happier days when Mom still felt good. The kids had so much fun playing together at Mom and Dad’s mountain home where you could hear the creek babble past their back yard. Please note that these photos were taken prior to the addition of a whole other section of grandkids — the children of my brother who is the baby of our family. Wish I had photos with all of the kids. There’s some out there somewhere….

There is nothing like old photos.  Bec’s husband Terry took something in the neighborhood of 175 million photos in his life. He used to drive us all mad with his hobby. But now we are so happy to have visual documentation of such happy days.

It got me thinking about what the younger generations are missing. (I know. Oh Lordy. Any sentence with the words “younger generations” in it is a cause for inward groaning.) 

Is this BJ or Court? Do you remember when Mom bought that dress? What was she thinking? Which cousin’s wedding was this? Do you remember how mad Mom would get at that dog? I can’t believe I wore that dress to prom. Was it possible for Dave to have a picture taken without making a funny face? How could men possibly have worn their shorts so, well, short?

I’m not a grouchy old woman who negates the significance of any kind of new technology. I have spoken ad nauseum about how happy I am to have the benefits of Facebook, Facetime, and instant photos. It just makes me a little sad to think about some of the things our grandchildren will never experience. Like paper photographs and letters.

You know – letters. Those things that you used to sit down at a table or desk with a pen and write. Using words. And then you would address an envelope and lick a stamp (whaaaaaaat?) and put it on the envelope and mail it. In two or three days, your letter would arrive at its destination and make the receiver very happy. Assuming your stamp didn’t come off the envelope.

When I was in grade school each of the students got some kind of a magazine to take home. Highlight Magazine? Doesn’t matter. Anyhoo, in the back were the names of kids who wanted to be pen pals. So I picked one, and she and I wrote letters back and forth for a bit of time.

I unfortunately can’t go on to tell you that my pen pal and I became fast friends and still correspond. Sigh. I don’t even remember her name. Or where she lived. Or anything about her. But what I do remember is how excited I was if I saw a letter lying on the kitchen table when I got home from school. It was like a gift that you could unwrap. Never mind that the letter was probably only two or three paragraphs. Someone had taken the time to write me a letter.

Bec and I were talking about this recently – about the excitement of getting a letter. She said she still gets momentarily excited when she sees a piece of mail that looks to have a stamp and a handwritten address. Alas, it’s never anything but a vendor who has figured out how to increase the possibility of us actually opening their appeal for a donation.

But here’s an advantage of our new technology. Many years ago, Mom went through all of their old photos and put together a photo album for each of her children featuring our own baby pictures. It was a treasure. In one of my moves, I lost that photo album along with a photo album containing baby pictures of my son Court. I have spent 25 years thinking those photo albums are going to appear. They won’t, of course because I likely left them in the storage locker where my worldly goods had to be kept for several months. It breaks my heart to this day.

If you have your photos on your telephone, I hope you occasionally dump them onto your computer, which you then occasionally back up to some sort of hard drive or cloud (another technological concept about which I only marginally understand). Because if you lose your phone, well……

Just a quick comment about St. Patrick’s Day. Bec made a delicious meal of corned beef and cabbage and invited us over. At dinner we talked about the fact that we have not one single, solitary drop of Irish blood in us seeings as Dad was 100% Swiss and Mom was 100% Polish, and how, even on St. Patrick’s Day, we have no particular yearning to be Irish. Don’t need green beer. Don’t care if the road rises up to meet you. Did manage to dig up my one and only green shirt to avoid getting pinched by my great niece and nephew Kenzie and Carter (who did, after all, pinch me because they determined my green wasn’t the right shade of green!). But man, I do love me some corned beef and cabbage.

Enjoy my photographs.

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