Old Pictures

I love looking through old photographs even if they are of people I may not know, which probably sounds really weird. If they are of people I don’t know I like to imagine what they were doing the day they got their picture taken and what their life may have been like. Looking through pictures is a visual trip back in time. Many times growing up and even now I’d get my grandma’s photo albums out and start looking through them. Often I wouldn’t know who the person in the photograph was so I would ask who ever was at the house at the time. Occasionally, I would get a response of ‘I don’t know who it is either.’ and than other times I would get the most treasured of all responses, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so, he or she is your (fill in the blank with a family relation)…’ and it would continue with a story, or stories about the person and an event that happen long ago. I guess it’s the part of me that loves reading but I could sit and listen for hours at a time of people telling stories about when they were growing up, especially the older generation. To often times we over look them and don’t want to take the time to listen to their stories or wisdom of what they learned from all of the things they have been through. I have some family members that have passed away and what I wouldn’t give to be able to sit down with them again and hear their stories. When my grandma got sick and fought her last round with cancer I so desperately wanted to sit with her and write down every little story she would tell me. To this day I truly regret not doing that. I have memories of a few of the stories still hanging out in my memory cabinets but not near as many as she told to me the short seventeen years I had with her. Another thing I wish I had more of are pictures of my grandma and of some more people. I personally despise having my picture taken and will do every thing I can and fight some one as long as I can before I will have my picture taken but if I had the opportunity again I’d take a lot more with my grandma. In fact, there is only one other person I truly hope to one day get around and get a picture taken with and no it’s no one famous but it is a good friend. I recently heard a lady say she carries around a picture of her son with her and some times when no one is looking she’ll get the picture out and kiss it. She said she didn’t do it because it was a piece of paper but because of whose picture was printed on that piece of paper and because she loved her son and was missing him. So often that’s why I’ll get out the old photo albums and look through them. I know the pictures can’t bring the person back but when I look at what’s printed on that paper for a time I can be with them again. Some times the pictures in our minds of people or even things aren’t as clear as we want but we can pull out those pictures and have that clear view of them again and if we’re really lucky some forgotten memory or story will be once again remembered. A little while  back I  had this happen to me and I would say it was an accident but I’m not so sure that would be true. I had gotten on Facebook and was looking through some old pictures I had uploaded to see if I could delete any when I came across a picture I had uploaded from when I was younger. It had some comments on it so I was reading through them before I made my final decision whether or not to delete that picture. A few comments down I see a picture and the name of my friend Tony who passed away this past December. I hadn’t even read the comment yet but by just getting to see his picture again it made me smile because it brought back the memories of him picking on me and than I read the comment and as I continued to smile tears began to roll down my face. I say all of this to just really say don’t ever just look at a picture and see a bunch of pixels combined to create an image because money can’t purchase those treasure memories that are held within those pixels.

As I was writing this post it reminded me of this song by The Judds: