Say "Cheese", please.

In addition to snapping pix of cacti, and sweating to the worst oldie radio station imaginable, I have been scanning pictures. This started more than three years ago when I realized that all my mother's carefully arranged, dates and organized pictures were deteriorating because she had used non-archival albums. Who knew back then that pasting dated pictures chronologically in albums was the wrong thing to do. It broke my heart to disassemble these fat glossy mementos that summed up the pictorial record not particularly of her life - there were really almost no pictures of her - but of my life and my brother's life and all parent's friends' lives. However, in the oldest ones, the edges were distinctly turning that old urine color which is not only nasty looking but also a sure fire litmus test that the album has ACID in it and that acid given only time as its impetus would slowly creep across the face of each and every picture. Thus, I bought a scanner and starting scanning. This project has grown to include my mother's pictures, my pictures, and now my mother-in-law's pictures.

First, let me tell you that we take way, way too many pictures. A little over 100 years ago, you could reasonably expect your picture to be taken maybe three or possibly four times in your life. You might be lucky enough to have your family encounter a traveling photographer who, would appear unannounced at your door with his camera over his shoulder and offer to take a picture. That's exactly what happened to my nine year old grandmother and her family in 1908. (FYI: She's the oldest girl with the humongous bow.) The photographer knocked at the door, and the result is the image of the family standing in front of the home place in Westville, Oklahoma including the dog, Dash, (whose name everyone still knew 70 years later) and the 'hired girl' (who is nameless because no one could ever remember her name). Photographers seldom covered the same territory twice, so he was here today gone tomorrow never to return unlike the traveling circus you could count on every summer or the traveling tinker that appeared at roughly the same time each year.

The second time you would expect your picture to be taken was on your wedding day. Usually this was one small picture in which no one smiled. Everyone seemed to instinctively grasp that the challenges one faces in a marriage are not smile worthy. Witness to point: My grandparents wedding shot in 1918. I would have looked a bit grim too. How could they have known that six children and the Great Depression lay in their future.

However, thirty years later, the idea takes hold that you should have multiple pictures to record the event of the wedding itself as well as all of the festivities. Notice the big smiles. This postwar wedding picture pretty much epitomizes the idea of capturing the event with the 'cake cutting' shot - not just still popular, but obligatory. A photographer wouldn't be in the wedding business long if he missed this shot. The wedding album was the forerunner of the picture craze that started in the 1950's.

Another event that sparks a picture being taken is going off to war. This started in the Civil War with soldiers putting on their uniforms and getting snapped - although the process was considerably more laborious than click/click in 1860. If you look back through any family's collection of pictures, you will find some variation of this shot. For some families especially in the two world wars of the 20th century, this would be the last image of their son since the body would have been ceremoniously buried far, far away.

The other enduring picture is the graduation shot. After having looked at one zillion family pictures, I have the high school graduation pictures of every person all the way back three generations. Why is it high school graduation that triggers a picture? That event has become the gateway between childhood and adulthood. The picture represents a frozen moment that says, "Now, my life is beginning. I certainly felt that way. Here's my 1968 grad shot - I'm 17 and can hardly wait for my life to start. I don't know what I was thinking with that striped top, though. At least I don't have Farah Fawcett hair like the girls who came 10 years after me.

Post World War II and the picture taking craze exploded. First, cameras became available to everybody with $20 and it didn't take any really specialized knowledge to take the shot. Forget F-stops and all that nonsense - just look through the little window and click the shutter.

People wanted to take pictures of their children. This desire has always been there, but not really terribly affordable to the rank and file prior to 1946. And it wasn't enough to just take pictures of your children, beginning in the 1950's you could have MOVIES of your children in color! Soon every family event was choreographed for the camera as well as for Dad pointing the seeringly bright light bar in your face as he rolled the movie film recording each Christmas, birthday, and vacation. I've often wondered why it is that only Dads who took movies when I was growing up - I never saw mothers making movies. Perhaps it gave the fathers something to do since God knows they wouldn't have been caught dead making food, cleaning up dishes, serving food, or cleaning up after children. Thus, everyone in my generation is documented from infancy through young adulthood on film. Everyone in my daughter's generation is documented both on film and in pixels. I wonder how my granddaughter will be documented?

The result of all of this photographic excess is picture upon picture upon picture as well as silent movies that most families can't even look at because no one thought to keep a projector. The dirty little secret of most families is 'the box'. It's usually cardboard, dusty, and filled to the brim with undated pictures recording the minutiae of every family occasion. People squint at the pictures usually just prior to or post of the death of an older family member. You hear the same comments: "Oh, man, LOOK AT MY HAIR!" "Did you make that dress, mother?" "How old was she in that picture?" "Well, that's got to be high school graduation, don't you think?" "What could I have been thinking when I married that loser!" "Oh, isn't that baby sweet - who is that and how old?" "Where was that taken?" Smart families just accept the box and embrace its mysteries.

Idiots like me try to catalog and organize the family photos. I get it naturally. My mother never let a photograph linger for longer than a week that wasn't dated and usually had the names of every person in the photo labeled on the back. I think it's in the blood. Now, I have new tools to play with. Can anyone say digital photography? You no longer have to wait an instant to see how the picture turned out (Remember that? You picked up the film usually at the drug store, and someone always said: "I wonder how the pictures turned out?"). My problem is I don't delete my digital photographs as ruthlessly as I should. However, upholding family tradition, all my pictures whether in paper or pixels are dated and labeled almost as soon as I shoot them. I also upload, download and thumbdrive everything.

Now I have a digital 'box' of albums that only I look at. I guess I'm hoping that 40 years from now, someone will marvel over my pixels as I've zealously captured MY family's life minutiae. I do believe that being remembered is a form of immortality. I just want to make sure you have a photo to go with the name and the stories. Actually, I will have scanned twenty photographs to go with the name and stories.

Do our pictures say subconsciously to ourselves that we lived and we cared, and we loved, and we hated, and we achieved? Is it the way of saying look at me, here I am. All of the above, I think. Even though I take too many pictures, I'm hard pressed to sweep the collection into the garbage. I try to stick to the rule "would my grandchildren want to see this picture", but it's really hopeless because photographs aren't just records of events, they trigger memories of the feelings during the events. I can look at pictures I've taken and those taken when I've been present and recall not only what I was feeling, but often the mood and feelings of the room and of the others present that day. That's the true value of my pictures. They brings back that 17 year old chomping at the bit to be out on her own, or the 20 year old consciously spreading her hand to show her new wedding ring in the photo, or the elation of that baby girl's first steps.

I'm pretty sure I don't plan on restricting my photographs as much as I should because I want and need those memories and feelings. They glue a family together at the very base. So while my neck is stiff and my fingers tired, I don't plan to give up on my grand scanning plan. I hope that my great grandchildren and beyond will find my albums and pour over them in hopes of knowing who their family is and who they are themselves. I just hope they don't laugh too much at the hair and clothing choices.

My Most Recent Field of Study

One of the smooth spots of living in Sun City is that the town is actually 50 years old. That means that all the desert vegetation is very mature and often spectacular. There are towering palm trees, squat palm trees, and citrus trees of every variety. The trees hang with grapefruit, navel oranges, lemons, and tangerines. We even have a navel orange tree in our yard that we have harvested.

Undoubtedly, the most interesting and unique plants are the cacti. I have been studying them, and have discovered there are several different types which are on display here. Sun City is a microcosm of the arborescent desert. This means that this place is full of cacti the size of trees. Pictures are worth more than words, so take a tour of the Sun City cactus colonies as well as common vegetation mistaken for cactus at the following website.

https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2011Cactus?authkey=Gv1sRgCIPLiMGys6nKmwE#