Here's the thing about family photos, and pretty much all other things.... if you have too many, it devalues all of them. The sheer volume transforms them from precious artifacts to a dreary nuisance. This is why diamonds are valuable and heaps of quartz crystals are just rubble. If you save hundreds of family photographs, when it comes time for someone else to deal with them, they are soon overwhelmed, and the little voice in their head goes from "This is cool!" to "Get rid of this shit!" Your preservationist instincts could help destroy the very thing you love. If there are just a few photos -- the best of the lot -- and especially if you have a good story about what tragically happened to the rest of them, such as "they all burned up when Grandma Henderson's house caught fire, and this was all we could save," or "they went down with the Titanic," then there is great interest in the remaining photos, and they will be infinitely treasured. Family items are like any other commodity; they are valued when they are scarce.
On a related note, I have a carton of photos -- of Mira, me, my parents, our grandparents, and so on. I was showing them to Emma a few months ago when she was here. She wanted to see them. We came across about seven different portraits of grandfather. Now that I think about it, having that many portraits of one person is a very bad thing. The first one or two that I looked at, I had a good impression of him as a person. He seemed dignified and substantial. But by the time I had come across the sixth or seventh one, my reaction had completely changed. I was thinking "What a vain, pompous asshole!" I'm pretty sure Emma had the same impression. I'm sorry that happened, and it'll probably take ten years for that impression to be erased from her mind. There were also too many pictures of Mira, come to think of it... she also was devalued by the quantity of images of her, not that there are all that many... but too many. So -- I'm thinking as I'm writing -- I'm going to cull out a few of the grandfather portraits, and a few of the pictures of Mira. Not because I don't care for their memory, but because I do. I want our kids to have a good impression of these relatives they never really knew, not to think they were tiresome bores. Would you like me to send the extras to you? If you don't, I'll just throw them away.
Speaking of the Titanic, I violated my no-Tv rule last night, and we watched part of an ABC miniseries about the Titanic. You had gotten me thinking about the Titanic, and we had forgotten to order DVD movies from Netflix. Well, "miniseries" isn't a good word for what we watched, because they were all bundled into a single showing, which lasted three hours. We hung in there for about an hour and a half, and then we just decided to go to bed. The show kept following characters until the point that the ship was sinking, then it would go all the way back to the launching of the ship and introduce some more characters, and show how they were interacting with the original characters up to when the ship was sinking, then back to the launching, and on and on. Once I got the hang of how the thing was organized, I pretty much bailed. Investing three hours meeting a few dozen characters, and getting roped into caring about them, and then watching them drown, just didn't do it for me. Plus the constant bombardment of advertisements, which were particularly jolting since it's been so long since I was subjected to TV ads. I noticed that once the ship hit the iceburg, and the viewers were presumably hooked at that point, they doubled the number of ads at each commercial break. What is interesting is that this morning I meditated, and I realized my head was full of Titanic-related thoughts, all based on the show. Those characters were still moving around and interacting in my head, like little wind-up toys. That's one of the great things about meditation. It's like having a faucet in the side of your head that you can open up to drain the stagnant pool of stupid thoughts that constantly gets refilled every day.
I didn't know that Thomas Kinkade supposedly pissed on a Winnie the Pooh statue at Disneyland. That's some serious shit. To most of Kinkade's fans, that's like urinating on God.
Those ideas you have if I come to visit sound like fun. I'd like to do those things. I'll let you know when the travel dates are a little more established.
--edward
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