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Pilfering Through My Photographs

I go through photos, tagging them, editing
the date and location of them, it’s a thing
I do.  I have hundreds of thousands in my
collection, mostly photos I’ve taken, but
there are numerous family photos, too.
Pictures from before I was born, of my
family.  One might analyze this long-
established habit, as I sometimes do.
I photograph to remember just as I
write to remember.  For most of you
out there, with memories unlike mine,
this might seem a stretch, or it might
even sound outlandish.  But it is true,
absolutely.  It’s a way to stir up a past,
to jog my memory about a thing that
literally happened in my vicinity, to me,
around me, however-many years ago.
I do it out of the desire to build a genea
logical web, my family tree.  There is perhaps 

more than a hint of nostalgia, but I never do it
strictly for nostalgia’s sake; although I suppose
the habit sprung from moments that were more
nostalgia-based, which would be any holiday my
family and I spent at my maternal grandmother’s,
in which we could always count on looking through
several of the family photo albums that were housed
in the living room.  This would transpire between a 

first and second indulgence of dessert.  Even then,
I could interject that my participation was an effort to
piece together the history of me, just the time I spend

doing so in the present is for much the same reason. 

It is building this unfinished history of the person I am

that has me most grateful for going through photographs,
makes me most grateful to have taken all of these snapshots
over the years, that I have horded as much as I can of those 

my family had or took in the years before I was able to do the
same.  This has me often pilfering through the photographs,

tagging, editing, remembering.  I could bore you more with 

how this works, like how just today I discovered who I was 

in the year 1993, which was someone and someplace altogether 

different than the person I thought I was that year.  I was literally 

missing an entire year.  And how delightful to discover this truth.

I could just say I enjoy looking through the photographs.  That 

one of the primary reasons this habit exists for me is that these 

are my keepsakes—as I’ve nothing material from before I
turned fifty, all of that stuff having been lost for
good thanks to life and its upheavals.  Or that
as far back as I can remember I have had a
strong case of obsessive compulsive disorder.
For which I’m grateful.  Whatever the case, 

as far as I am concerned, it’s a nice way to
pass the time.  And in the process
I get what I consider an 

important education.

And as long as I take

the time to go through

my pictures, that 

education continues.