The Beauty of Old Photographs

When I lost my aunt in December, my cousins asked me to rifle through pictures to see what I had, and it reminded me of so many things. There is something lost now, isn’t there? With our phones and our i-pads and our video capacity. We seem to lose so much, and one would think it would be the opposite, but it really isn’t. There is something special about those old photographs, much like old letters or postcards we’ve kept over the years. There’s something about holding them in our hands, touching them, running our fingers across the front, flipping them over to read the back, see the year, maybe the place. My mother was forever marking up those photographs. And everything looks so…I don’t know, pretty and nostalgic, especially when in black and white, like some of my mom’s baby pictures or first communion I came across. They somehow feel alive. They feel as if they're breathing right there next to us.
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The same is true of old letters or writing. There really is nothing that can replace handwriting. I remember holding Emily Dickinson’s work once in the basement annex of Amherst College, wearing gloves, being watched as if I might steal them. Smart. I wanted to. I regret the love letters I tossed or the notes from friends during class. I had a best friend and she and I wrote old-fashioned letters to one another in middle school, professing our “friends forever” in black-ink promises, only to be tossed as I moved or aged. Not enough space. Oh, the regret!

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A new study I read recently stated that this generation (is that me?) is losing living in the moment. That everyone is so Instagram-ized, trying to take the best pictures possible – oh, look at me eating this; or oh, I just saw this magnificent sunset; or oh, look at my dog being silly—that we’re no longer really living in the moment, or even enjoying it, or even REMEMBERING IT at all later, but instead, living for the moment to take a damn picture. How sad if that’s true! What will become of our memories or experiences if we’re so hung up on taking the picture, not for ourselves, but instead for someone else to say: Oh, isn’t Rosemary the coolest cat ever?  

When I came across some of the pictures, it reminded, too, of my childhood and a scene in Edge of Torment I took from my own life, where Patricia, Annabelle’s best friend, has displayed a photograph of the two of them at Patricia's brother Billy’s wedding. It’s two best friends in a pool wearing funky glasses, and I remember exactly the moment I stole the idea from. It was with my cousin, my favorite cousin still to this day, and at the service, I asked her if she too remembered those days in the back yard at 4 or 5 or if the memory was only because of that picture. She remembered it just as I had and, though sad at where we were presently, we smiled and laughed and hugged, poured some wine afterwards, and sat down to reminiscence. That’s what photographs do for us. And I’m grateful I still have boxes upon boxes of them even if I’ve lost so many of the people in them. They are engraved somewhere inside my heart’s mind, far from being lost. And that brought me comfort.