It was some time in 2006 or maybe 2007, for some reason I think the summer.  My father was cleaning out his office after a semi-forced retirement, and he was taking advantage of the sizable unfinished basement in the antique home I had purchased.  I was using the basement primarily as storage, and I was a single guy.  And although I am a bit if an accumulator, I was still just one person, so it was a small ask.  There was the semi functional CPAP machine he had used maybe twice.  Then there was the not insignificant collection of Civil War books.  And of course some stuffed birds, trophies of past hunting trips he had ignominiously gone on with his compatriots, but, alas, without a single one of his three exclusively male progeny.  It was stuff my Mom did not really want in the house, even if they were not at the time discussing getting the house ready to sell, as they were empty nesters with too much yard work, and not enough cash.    The piece de resistance was a brace of heavy duty black lawn and leaf bags, clearly encasing good sized cardboard boxes that were bulging from their contents.  The weight was overwhelming.  Each alone was too heavy for anyone to reasonably pick up, and we struggled to edge them out of his SUV, and into the middle of the concrete of my basement floor.

What were these blocks being sent to encase my legs and pull me to a watery death?  They were, in short, a life’s work of one of my father’s de facto major hobbies.  He had miniature trains.  He had the Civil War Round Table, with particular emphasis on surgery of that era. Later in his life he came to fishing, still later to bird hunting, and eventually to elk hunting.  But before any of these, there was photography.  What my father was depositing on my floor was approximately 15,000 slides.  Actually, pretty much every image he had captured, from the time he got his own camera to the point that he got a digital camera, which was only a couple of years prior.  I actually did not realize at the time it was ALL of his slides.  I somehow thought of these as the surplus, less important, images that he did not mind giving up immediately access to.  But later, the full magnitude of this event would dawn in me more completely.  And in retrospect, this can be interpreted as a harbinger of his pending demise.

So they sat in my basement.  And my life got a lot more complicated, in short order.  Career, marriage, and then kid after kid.  I organized my Father’s funeral.  Got my Mom settled in a new empty nest.  Moved my own growing family five times.  Searching, with some difficulty, for a home that was big enough, but not too expensive, but somehow also got my kids in the right school for them.  All the while toting two giant, impossibly heavy, lawn and leaf bags which hermetically sealed my father’s gift.  Trash or treasure?  How was I to really know without opening them and going through them?  And that time I definitely did not have.   Two or three times I resolved to just chuck them.  My mom had a meticulously cataloged library of photos that she had taken of the family since the day I was born.  So why not lighten my load?  Our load.  My wife thought I was crazy for not getting rid of them years prior.  Truth be told, it was their heft that saved them.  Two or three times, fueled by a vision of refreshing my life, I decided to just trash them.  The problem was, they were so heavy, I was going to either need to hire and arrange someone to come and get them, or take the time to open them, break them into manageable subdivisions, and carry them out to the dumpster myself.  So they stayed.

After a decade or so, I found a moment to really pay attention— not so much to a retrospective of my family— but to thinning our storage.  Mainly to make room for other, newer stuff.  So I opened the bags, and started to go through, see what was really there.  It was at this point that I realized that these were all of his slides.  No starting lineup squirreled away at my Mom’s condo.  These were photos all the way back to the mid 1950s, when my Dad got his first camera, in his late teens.  And in among this onslaught of memory and culture, I knew I was not going to be able to blindly trash them.  But I also couldn’t have them taking up all the space they took up.  So I started to look into getting them scanned, somehow, into digital files.  It’s more affordable at the moment I write this, but at the time, I estimated it was going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to pay some service to do this.  The additional cost of such investment being that any captioning, order of images, in short— extant context— would be lost.  As much as I wanted more space in our storage room, it seemed too high a cost.  So I found I could pay $350 for a digital scanner that would allow me to scan the images myself.  And, bonus, it would also scan photo negatives as well as slides, so eventually I could tackle my Mom’s library as well.  The scanner arrived in a few days.  And then began my second career as an image scanner.  A librarian, historian, torch bearer of culture.  I became a rememberer.

Scanning images is meditative.  You put four slides in the rail at a time.  Click it into place, push the scan icon in the software.  It takes about twenty seconds to scan each image.  Then you click the rail to the next slide, hit scan again.  If you want to look at the image first, you can hit pre-scan, which lets you look at the image on your computer in the scanning software.  You can adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, color before you scan.  Also, you can make sure you have not put the slide on backwards or upside down.  The problem with prescan is that you end up cutting your speed in half.  As you are basically scanning each image twice.  So as I went, I developed a workable technique.  I would prescan at what I thought was a new roll of film, but after that I would just scan blindly after adjusting parameters for that first image.  I did look at each scanned image.  While the fourth image in the rail was scanning, I would look at the first three.  In addition to looking at the image, I would add a unique name for the image, including any appropriate caption.  So the only down nonscanning time was the time it took me to review each fourth scanned image, and then the time to unload the rail, and reload it with four new slides.  The scanned, reviewed, slides went right to the trash can, achieving the first goal I had, which was making space in my storage areas.

So there was a set amount of time that scanning was going to take, no matter how hard I concentrated, worked hard, moved quickly.  And there would inevitably be time spent thinking about context, order, caption.  And of course, content.  It was not possible to do some other task while scanning in this way.  Yes, twenty seconds is a long time to sit doing nothing, but I had to move the rail, push the scan button, make sure everything was working right.  Auto pilot was not a thing.  Given all of this, I ended up averaging about one minute per slide, when I continuously active scanning.  So let’s see, 15,000, divided by 60 equals 250 hours.  Hell, doesn’t sound too bad.  Of course, finding time to scan slides for more than 20 minuets in a day was not easy.  And most days, my scanning time equaled zero, even with this being the primary extracurricular project to which I was devoted. So, yeah, years.

But the operative time issue was not the overall time it would take me to finish the task of scanning all of these slides.  What was critical was the 20 seconds.  Twenty seconds of boredom.  Twenty seconds of wandering thoughts.  Twenty seconds of forced contemplation.  Like meditation.  Like prayer.  And where did my mind go?  Image after image in front of me.  Images of times past.  Some I remembered well, some not at all.  It was a documentation of my Father’s life from his late teens onward.  But it was also a documentation of my own life, from the moment I was born.  And it was documentation of my family, how it was formed from the intersecting lives of my parents. And then how it branched out into the lives of my brothers and myself.  Much more than a reminder of my own changes over time, and ultimate mortality, this was a chronicle of culture, of time passing, of identity.

I have always been a recliner.  I prefer a meal eaten from my lap as I sit on a couch than one eaten, bolt upright, at a dining room table.  I always take my office chairs and click the button that allows you to lean back like you were in a Lazy-boy.  I have received some measure of teasing for this tendency, but I own it.  When they accuse me of breaking the chairs, I retreat to my smug sense of superiority.  I mean, after all, Proust wrote almost exclusively from a reclining position in his bed.  And he is Proust for God’s sake.

What if I told people what I was really thinking?  My sixth grade teacher would tell the class that if any of us could remember all of our dreams, and write them down, then we would have a best seller.  What if I told people what I was thinking about at each moment, each time of my life?  Would that be as good?  Do people even sell books any more?  My memory is pretty good.  And looking at the images of my whole life reminded me, repeatedly, of what and how I was thinking, at moment after moment in time.

There is stuff I want to say to my kids.  I try sometimes.  Sometimes heartfelt advice, born of my own experience.  Sometimes practical quick tips for simplifying, or improving day to day life.  Sometimes just a memory, of something in my life, maybe when I was their age, or maybe because something they were experiencing sparked a memory of my own experience, possibly germane.  I guess the last of these have landed the best.  But, you know, any listening to me, much less remembering what I say, almost never occurs.  Doesn’t matter how loud I say it, or with what aura of import.  Or with threats.  But there have been times when things strike a chord with them.  and they remember it, and it changes their thinking.  Often not the times I expected, or desired, but it definitely happens.  The fact is, kids do care about their parents thoughts, and experience, but only on their own terms.  In their own time.  I had thought to collect a world of advice, write it down.  Not tell it to them, just let it sit.  So after I die, whether sooner or later, they could consult what I had to say, and take from it what they would.  This idea seemed especially important for advice significant to an age they had not yet reached.  But as my older kids have gotten older, and reached some of those age benchmarks I feared I might not be around to edify with topical wisdom juice, I find that just because they reach the age, or have certain experiences, that does not mean I have the opportunity or inclination to dispense my wisdom shards.  Nor does it mean they listen to them, as appropriate as they may be for their situations, or take from them what I intend.

Perhaps it is the greatest frustration, challenge, of being a parent.  The realization that your kids will probably make the same mistakes you did, whether you warn them or not.  It’s a value play.  We hope our heartbreak will inoculate more than just ourselves from the pain.  But, alas, there are some principles regarding being human that cannot be countermanded.  But I know I have taken great relief from reading words of others, who have related experiences that tell me I am not alone in my thinking, in my experience, in my emotion.  Would there be value in writing down my own experience?  I have lived no particularly dramatic or eventful life.  But I do have a good memory.  Would it be worth anything to my kids to know what I was really thinking about at each moment in my life?  Would it inform them as to who I was?  Who they are?  Would it give them comfort?  Would it inspire?  Would they ever even read it?  Perhaps just lay it out, no agenda.  Just relating the agendas I had at the times.  Where from have come my own values.  My own identity.  My own voice.  Maybe, eventually, even for just one of them slightly, some sliver of help in developing their own?

The concept has risk.  I don’t see much point if the activity is not brutally honest, and complete.  I know right now I have had thoughts that will be quite offensive to anyone hearing them.  But I cannot exclude these.  Isn’t that really part of the point?  We think many things, but we are selective about what we reject, what we embrace.  And we are even more selective about what we act on.  Like Marlowe, back from the Darkness, I could, nay should, lie for sake of my honor, my relationships, my standing in society.  But I will not lie.  Not in my writing.  We take our lives in our hands when we write.  This is part of what that means.  We risk who we are when we write, at least if we right truthfully, from the heart.  I intend to own the Cringe.  And there will be cringes.

Just know this.  When I tell you what I think in secret, what I have done in darkness, I do not transform into something you do not know.  It is those secrets that have made me into the me you know, for better or worse.  Especially when we talk about or past selves, our pediatric selves no less, remember that those past selves are not still there in their past forms.  Some part of our selves goes on from form to form, but a butterfly cannot be thought of as an ugly worm, crawling over leaves.  Even if that is what it once was.