Preserve Your Memories

Time it was,
And what a time it was
It was . . .
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you
Paul Simon, Bookends

This song resounds when you’ve spent the last week and a half managing the fallout from a garage flood. Most of this involved communication between plumbing companies, insurance, water remediation, unit owners, and an association board. Only after addressing the larger crisis have I been able to assess my own losses. Despite having placed our storage above the ground, the flood was such that it soaked the bottom of the box holding my photos and handwritten journals—which were incidentally the only things I cared about in that space.

Now I’m in the process of drying out books and photographs. Some journals were hit hard, and portions with weaker ink were wiped out.

Silver Linings

Because the photo albums were vertical rather than horizontal, and because the box was off the floor, the bottom photographs are affected, whereas the top ones are more or less ok. But they must all be removed from their albums and their albums must be pitched.

In addition, several years ago I had all the negatives I could find digitized. I don’t have negatives of every photo in the albums, but I have several collections.

Digitize your important memories. Scan Cafe did a great job with my photographs. They accept prints, negatives, and tapes. You can send them a box, and they’ll do the job in bulk. For an extra fee, they’ll even do digital restoration on photographs you select. Most of the work they did on mine looked great. The service was easy to use. I only had to pack my photos in a box, send it off, and wait. You don’t have to pay for every image—just the ones you want, though there is a minimum for the order.

Once you have your memories digitized, you’ll want to back them up and then back them up again. For me, this means I have the physical discs Scan Cafe sent, the hard drive(s) I copied them to, and an online storage service as well. Backblaze is a great service that keeps a backup of your computer. For an additional fee, you can back up multiple computers and drives. The point is to back up your backups so that they exist in multiple places, both physical drives and online storage.

Discoveries

It’s a strange trip, driving into the past. Photographs become increasingly valuable the more time goes by. As people we’ve known and loved leave this world, the photograph and the memory are what remain.

Browsing old handwritten journals is a different story. I want to give that kid an earful, but I also want to give him a pass. Granted, he’s writing stream of consciousness morning pages. And he’s in his early twenties, living in a prosperous pre-9/11, pre-smart phone, pre-social media USA. Is it any wonder that the traits I’m least patient with in others these days are the ones that dominated me as a younger person?

I found some lost treasures among the photographs. Among these were senior pictures of old friends, as well as a photograph of (The Expanse’s) Cas Anvar and I that a friend had given me when we were touring A Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet through the US and Canada in the summer of 2000. I hadn’t known or remembered that a picture of us existed together.

Steve Townshend and Cas Anvar, Repercussion Theatre tour 2000.

Archaeology

A while back, I posted the first pictures I had taken when I received my first real (film) camera at Christmas 1994. But those weren’t my very first pictures. In the fourth grade, I participated in the Bike Ride for Diabetes in the Quad Cities. I did this because my classmate was diabetic, and she was the leader of our archaeological expeditions at recess, unearthing this big rock on the playground. We received prizes for the miles we biked, and I got a little point-and-shoot film camera. I took it on a class trip to the Putnam Museum, where I took pictures of the Egyptian exhibit. I took pictures of my family, the dog, and the Crossbows and Catapults game I got for Christmas that year. Somehow, these very first pictures survive. I estimate this was 1984, and I was nine years old. I still remember the names of the two girls in the photograph, though I haven’t seen them for forty years.

First-ever photographs, circa 1984, featuring the family dog, Crossbows & Catapults, Egyptian exhibit at the Putnam Museum, classmates at the exhibit, two sisters, and some lens flare.

Tears in Rain

I didn’t back up prints that others had given me because all those prints existed in albums, and the albums were safely in storage and had survived decades this way. When I was doing the Scan Cafe digitization, going through all my albums looking for images I didn’t have the negatives for was beyond the scope of my project at the time. But I’ll do it now, and I suggest you do too.