No More Nostalgia Hoarding

Reminding myself that these aren't *my* memories

My grandmother is the world's worst photographer.

There are eight decades of photos she's taken where she just kind of points a camera in the general direction of someone and clicks. There are thousands of them. There are ones that survived her house fire in the 1970s, but not its smoke or water damage. Ones from her trips all over the world, with her finger over the lens, with the cap closed, with our eyes closed, and with the flash off in the wrong environment. No constructive feedback or wasted money on dark and blurry photo sets were ever enough to get her to rethink her shooting style. To a certain extent, the mid-pose candids and blur in her photos actually give them an added layer of life, and I'm happy for that.

So many of my memories of her are synced to the sound of a winding disposable camera.

Every time I go visit her in Pennsylvania, we go through a chunk of photos together. She's 89 now, and although she's always handed off memories and history, in the last few years, it's been done with more urgency. She gives me the names and memories, I write them down on the backs of each photo, and I take them back to LA with me with the goal of scanning and organizing them all into a family photo book.

That's the plan, anyway.

What actually happens is that the photos just sit in a box under my bed for years.

But every now and then, I go through the box.