Emma is interested in old photographs and family stuff, within limits. I'm sure Henry will value some photos too, as long as he isn't confronted with a whole heap of them, the good and the bad all mixed together in a confusing tangle. In that case he'd probably lose all interest and say he didn't want any of them. I am pretty sure my approach to photos is a good one, if the main goal is to have a new generation cherish an essence of family history and and some of the objects. It's like in a garden -- a whole bunch of little carrot seedlings all crowded together growing on top of each other. If you want any of them to flourish, you've got to thin them out, try to give the best ones some space and sunlight. If you cut down on the overall number of photos, you make the remaining ones a whole lot more appealing. Maybe more important, there's the fact that you're not just randomly cutting down on the quantity of photographs; you're getting rid of the ones that aren't even interesting, the ones that make the whole batch seem uninteresting and overwhelming by association.
You wouldn't have to actually get rid of the duds if that was a problem for you. You could store them away in a box somewhere. The first step would be to separate the really interesting ones from the whole mass, then put the mass away some place where nobody else has to deal with them and possibly get infected with the "ugh, let's just chuck this stuff" virus.
Watching the Titanic show wasn't at all a disaster, and was nothing like eating at In-n-Out Burger, which definitely was a bad, bad experience. I actually enjoyed the part of the show I watched. It's just that when it got to a certain point and I weighed the enjoyment of watching another hour and a half of the program, compared with the benefits of sleeping for an hour and a half, sleep won out. The cost of watching the rest of program would be a day of fatigue interspersed with disturbing sadness. Plus the ads were just killing me. It was like I could see myself as a puppet, being manipulated to sit there and watch, while they kept increasing the number of ads at each break once they know the viewers were getting hooked. It's degrading. But sleep was the main factor.
Bruce Ismay, right. Okay, now you have triggered my knee-jerk contrary streak, which is one of the most prominent features of my personality. I'm going to stand up for the guy even though I used to hate him too, thanks to the way he is so effectively portrayed as the evil, slimy villain in the Titanic movies I've seen. But now I feel a little sorry for him. I read up a little about him, to gather information to support my new, more forgiving hypothesis. This Bruce Ismay guy was an insecure, ill-at-ease person, bullied and overshadowed by his self-made tycoon father. He felt more comfortable with things -- like ships -- than people. I think he was truly enthralled with the Titanic, and had complete faith in its safety and elegance, which is why he didn't want to mess up the gracefulness by cluttering it up with a bunch of what he assumed were additional unnecessary lifeboats. The guy had few close friends and was estranged from his wife. The ship was his love. He was out of his depth as manager of the White Star Line, which his blustering father had started. Then of course he horribly fails the bravery test when the ship goes down -- a test that many would fail, and few have to face. If he had just mastered his fear -- or just been knocked out by a piece of falling debris -- and gone down with the ship, he wouldn't be hated. Sure, people would have said he was guilty of some bad judgment, but essentially he would be considered an okay guy. But no, panic overcame him and he got in a lifeboat. When it was all over, his hair had turned white almost overnight. He spends the next 25 years as one of the most hated, scorned people on earth. I don't think he can be blamed for the company's treatment of its employees after the sinking; his reputation was gone and he didn't last long at the helm of White Line. He definitely had some serious character flaws that wouldn't have mattered much except that he was the big man in the century's biggest disaster. Destiny had him in its crosshairs. And speaking of destiny, you've got this line, that could very well be true, that we are all largely products of our inborn characteristics and genes. We are who we are. That's true for him too.... he was just playing out the hand that was dealt to him. He didn't get off scot free, that's for sure. Those last 25 years of his reclusive life must have seemed pretty long and sad, being the person everyone despised.
An amazingly warm day here in Maine today, for the month of April, following up on a very, very mild winter. We're all scuttling happily about like lobsters in a pot where the temperature is gradually being turned up degree by degree. A that the weatherman would call "another glorious, unusually warm spring day."
--edward
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