"We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, less species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselves preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know that we lived." The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

A couple of weeks ago I read this compelling novel about a young woman, a professional photographer, who is walking on a beach with her fiance's six-year-old daughter. The woman sees a dead seal pup and stops to take a photo. When she turns back, the six-year-old has vanished. The novel explores the search for this child placed in the care of someone 'not quite her mother'. But more than that, it explores memory. How does memory actually work? Why do we remember some things and not others? As humans, how does memory serve us, fail us? What can we do to preserve memory or jog it when needed? All fascinating questions.

Toward the end of the novel, I was taken aback by the paragraph above. Its truth goes straight for the heart, doesn't it? I was probably taken so with these words because it brought into the light a strange part of my personality with which I have struggled. I love to go into antique stores, love looking at the china, furniture and even clothing that has been held dear by people and been preserved for our use and our memory of what we often perceive of as 'simpler' times. I am fairly certain that perception is not true. But the one thing I cannot bring myself to look at in these stores are the boxes of old photographs. These images of the people's lives placed in cardboard boxes for total strangers to rifle through disturbs me. I want to buy them all, take them home, fill albums with them. 

With the use of digital photography,taking pictures comes so easily to us these days. We can take a picture, zoom in, zoom out, take the red out of eyes, crop pictures, in an effort to create the 'perfect' image. But we all know life is not like that. Sometimes we look goofy, our hair askew, eyes closed, our mouths in a sideways position, not quite a smile or frown. Unlike our ancestors who had to remain very still, perhaps travel long distances to 'sit' for a photo, we take them and discard them with the push of a button. A quirky little thing our family does is to keep some of those 'bad' photos, the ones in which we don't look our best, and preserve them in little books called 'The Beautiful People'. They bring such laughter as we look through these albums. They remind us that we are not always at our best, that looking disheveled and unattractive is all a part of being human, of living a life.

At times we will take out picture albums and begin to look through them with our children or with friends. Looking at the images of us as younger, sometimes thinner people, always brings the eventual storytelling. "Remember that?" "What was I thinking wearing that?" "Oh, wasn't that a lovely day?" "Didn't she look wonderful?" On and on the memories and the stories will unfold. In their telling we remind ourselves of who we are, who we once were and, if we are lucky, we pass the story on to another generation who might continue its telling. The photos are the catalyst that connects with some experience that has been planted in the cells of who we are. That experience lays waiting to be conjured up and relived, retold, passed on. For as long as people have been picking up rocks and charred sticks and painting their stories on the walls of caves, it has been true. We tell, and we try to capture our images, so we will be remembered, so we can remember.

Do you have an old photo album that has remained dusty on a shelf? Is there a drawer packed with pictures you have been waiting till you have time to organize in an album? Perhaps it is a good time to take a look at those photos and remember. Remember and tell someone the story of that special day, that special person. The gift of memory is one of the true acts of being human and one to be celebrated. Because, indeed, this moment can never be lived again.