Wednesday's With Lila

Sue Behm, Peggy Buck, Some old guy, and Me.

In the office in my mom's house, are about twenty photo albums. Before my dad passed he went about the task of arranging all the snapshots and photos of our family in these albums. They're arranged by year and by event. It must have taken him quite a while to do this tedious job. The family is very happy that he did this, but being one of eleven siblings who are all in those photos, I had to wonder how they would be eventually divided up. We certainly do not have a designated curator other than my mom. No historian that would pass the collection down intact. So I have taken it upon myself to scan as many of them as I can, into my computer. Every Wednesday, when I bring Mom lunch, I use the second hour of my visit to scan photos. I lug the big scanner out into the kitchen, attach it to my computer, and start systematically going through the photo albums. I started at 1945 and I am now up to 1956. I pull the photos out of each page in the book, and before or after I put them through the scanner, I hand them to Mom.

"Who's this?" I'll ask. She'll sit there sipping on her vanilla milk shake (I bring her one every Wednesday) and then suddenly it will come back to her.

"Oh, that's my cousin Marian."

"Do you know these people." I ask again, as I hand Mom a photo of some rowdy looking characters.

"Yes, that's the Tau Club Picnic. That's Hildegard... Hmmm... "

She will sit there for quite a while, looking the photo over with her magnifying glass. Mom has had some problems with her memory in the last couple of years. At times she has got a bit confused about what year it is, what day it is, and who it was that visited her the day before. What I have noticed, is now that I'm going through all these photos with her, is that her memory seems a bit better. The fact that I have included Mom in the job of scanning the pictures does slow things down a bit. I usually can get twenty to twenty five photos scanned each week. Also, besides the albums my dad put together, I have found a treasure trove of really old stuff in my grandfather's old desk. I have been trying to scan that stuff also. It's not all photos, but lots of documents about the family from over a hundred years ago. What I intend to do when I am all done, is put everything on CDs or flash drives for my brothers and sisters. That way when Mom is gone, there won't be a mad scramble for those photos. Next week, more of 1956 and maybe even some 1957. That's the year our family grew from five children to six. I wonder if Mom realized there were still five more to come?

Grandpa as a baby. 1886, Birmingham England.