As part of the whole ongoing purging of old crap, I have been going through old pictures.  Thousands of old pictures.

When we cleaned out my dad’s house, we found stacks of pictures in a closet. I took them back home with me to Florida thinking I’d eventually do something with them.  Still working on that.  Turns out, I had stacks and stacks of pictures of my own squirreled away in various drawers and boxes.  I really had no idea just how many stacks there were until I started emptying out the drawers and throwing all the pictures into boxes to sort through.  I am on my third sort this weekend.

Some of us over a certain age…ahem….will remember the good ole days of film cameras.  The old 120 film with the square flash bulbs and manual advancing of film.  I remember when we splurged on a camera with built in flash and auto advance film.  Back in those days, you took a picture and hoped for the best.  You didn’t take a lot of pictures because film, flash bulbs and developing cost money.

There were some really awful pictures in those stacks.  Heads were cut off.  Bad exposure.  Some were of seemingly nothing at all.  But there were some hidden gems, like this one when I was in my early teens.  Yes, we actually had a rabbit that was housebroken and lived in our house.

There were lots of things I didn’t remember doing.  Lots of pictures that brought back no memories at all. Those have been thrown away.  It wasn’t all that hard, really.

There were some that brought back weird memories like this one take at my friends’ wedding:

I was around 20 in this one, taken the spring before my senior year in college.  I don’t recall much about the wedding except for the tonsillitis I inexplicably came down with just a week or two before the big day. I had my tonsils out at age 5 so it seemed a bit of a stretch to have tonsillitis, or so I argued with the on campus doctor.  Turns out your tonsils can actually grow back OR a small amount of tissue was missed which became infected.  Weird.  It has never happened again.  This was also the last year I would wear glasses.  That summer I was fitted for contacts.

There were also bittersweet memories.  This was taken on a trip to Orlando when I was 24.

When I was sent to Columbus, OH for training to be an adjuster, I met someone – Lance Denman – who worked in the Orlando office.  On one of the very first trips I took as an adult, I flew to Orlando to spend the weekend at Lance’s family’s house and we went to Disney, or Epcot at least, where this was taken.  Who knew that just a few years later Lance would pass away from cancer.

It’s been a nostalgic ride.  In a way, it’s much more fun to flip through actual paper photographs then to scroll through digital ones.  Film went by the wayside at least 10 years ago for me.  Sad but true.

I can still remember dropping off the pictures at the drugstore or grocery store and then waiting days or a week for them to be processed.  Oh the thrill of ripping open the envelope to see if the pictures had “turned out” or not.  There were no do overs in those days.

Like the trip I took to Arizona and the Grand Canyon in 1989 or 1990.  I flew to Phoenix and stayed with friends from college and then drove to Flagstaff for a few days.  That was likely one of the first trips I did all by myself.  My brother allowed me to take his 35mm camera which was shocking in and of itself.  This was the old 35mm camera where you had to load the film by pulling it across the back of the camera.  Apparently, I didn’t pay close enough attention to the loading film lessons and failed horribly.  Every single roll came out embarrassingly blank.   That would never happen with a digital camera unless the memory card was bad and even then you would know it before returning home.  No do overs indeed.

There are people who would argue that I am throwing away the past with this project.  I prefer to think of it as holding on to the parts of the past that matter.  The family and friends (and pets!) that I remember.  The things that still make me smile.

Keep what’s important, forget about the rest.