YOUR SAY: RESOLUTIONS
We asked: As the year draws to a close, what New Year’s resolutions did you keep and which fell by the wayside in 2021, and what ones will you make for 2022?
Let’s try again to put memories in order
Making a New Year’s resolution is like walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
On the one hand, you’re excited about taking that first step towards a laudable goal: the other side of the chasm. You imagine the rewards: Huzzah! Cheers! You made it!
On the other hand, you could slip, lose your footing and plummet into the foaming waters, an animated portrait of defeat.
At least that’s the way I picture my New Year’s resolutions from past years: noble beginnings, groaning disasters.
It’s all because I inevitably make the same resolution every year: Organize my photos.
And I am not alone in writing down this simple goal on the last day of December.
I’ve clipped out enough articles titled “What to Do With Family Photos” and “Finally Organize Those Photos” to know that there are others who tremble at the thought of tackling their photo hoards.
As one of those articles reminds me: “The idea of sorting through them feels daunting, so instead you do nothing. The shots pile up; the cycle continues.”
What if one’s hesitancy to embark on sorting through old family photos is part of a cycle? Aren’t family photos evidence of the cycles of our lives: birth, growth, age, death? Do we avoid sorting through the boxes of photos in order to avoid cycling through the stages of our lives?
Throughout the first dozen years of my life, my mother, a Brooklyn girl who came out west with the love of her life, my father, another New Yorker who went to France in 1917 as a U.S. Marine, held a Kodak Brownie box camera at waist level and took “snapshots” of her only child. A teacher, housewife and then a working mother, she didn’t let the printed photos pile up in a Thom McAn shoe box.
Instead, she dislodged small rolls of exposed film from the camera, left them at the corner drug store and returned five days later to pick up the glossy black-and-white images of her 11-year-old daughter, squinting in the unyielding California sun.
Those images, at least 200 of them, went into a black album embossed on the cover with “Photographs.” Inside, on soft black pages, my mother lovingly penned with white ink the location of the snapshot and a date. She was so enamored of the wonder of those images that she even kept a double exposure of a 5-year-old’s first elephant ride, noting: “I was so excited!”
Maybe the focus of preserving these small black-and-white images was tinged with the rapture of a new technology. The Brownie camera had been invented by Kodak only 30 years earlier, and its magic was tangible and attractive.
So if there’s a New Year’s resolution on my list, it’s to sort, toss and organize my photos while remembering that life is a cycle of moments when we reached for a camera saying, “I’m so excited!”
Regina Morin, Ocean Beach