Memorabilia

How I Store My Memories

Through the years I have kept journals, diaries, and other paper-based records (and I'm not even counting tax returns and such).  I also have many thousands of photographs and color slides dating from the time I bought my first box camera as a teenager, and reels of eight-millimeter and the later super-eight-millimeter movie film, which began after our son was born.  Then there came the various gauges of videotapes, most of which had their creation after our first granddaughter came into the world.

My garage has boxes upon boxes of all manner of memorabilia collected over seven decades or so.  Physical storage space is now at a premium.

So I have been trying diligently to convert what I can of this material to digital storage.  With the aid of complex electronic hardware and sophisticated software I have managed to capture a good deal, in bits and pieces, over the past several years, with the hope that one day our great-grandchildren and their progeny will know something of their heritage through these long-ago images and writings.

It's a legacy project that will likely occupy the remainder of my sentient life, and whether I will succeed in achieving its completion, only the good Lord knows.  

As always, it is a matter of time, for this is a very time-consuming effort we speak of here.

I want to take this opportunity make an observation about time.

During our working lives, those of us who are now retired used to look forward during the workweek to the approach of Friday and the weekend.  Wednesday was 'hump day', remember? And Monday was the day most working people hated, so much so that we believed (I think it's still a pretty common belief today) that you would not want to buy a car that was made on a Monday, because the autoworker would not be in the best of shape at the start of the workweek.

Well, here's my observation.  Now that we are retired, Fridays come at us with much greater frequency.  I kid you not.  Just look at the newspaper delivered to your front door (which, by the way, is becoming skinnier and very much less interesting nowadays, but that's a whole 'nother story).  

Every couple of days, it's the Friday paper — another Friday has arrived!  There are more Fridays than other days of the week?  Or have the other days simply disappeared from the calendar?

Where has the time gone?