Scrapbook Memories
I fully acknowledge that I am a sentimental guy. I’ve held on to relics from my past for various reasons over the years but all with the best of intentions. The relics are carrying with them nostalgia for events they represent all by themselves to some degree but more so they represent for me a means of celebrating and fondly remembering things than a sense of regret or a longing to return to the time when I experienced them the first time around. This isn’t to say I don’t ever find regret when looking backward at times but I tend to regret more my inability to recall more of the events I have had in my 50 years of living than the inability to live them all over again. There is a balance to strike though because I simply can’t catalog every waking moment of every single day so these relics tend to focus on the more significant things. Whether they are classified as significant or not is ultimately up to me and I do seem to find a way to hold on to the relics that might go along with those that I do.
Historians have preserved the past in written accords and there are museums that can be visited for chances to view artifacts that tell the story in a more visual manner. Individual lives can lean on written records too but most of those would likely be a personal journal with date references. Photographs have been the primary means of assisting visual recall as our memories fade with time. We’ve had diaries and photographic albums in use for quite some time. My school years offered a formal record in fact full of class pictures and events over a specific school year all in one collective place in the form of a yearbook available for purchase. We even took the time to have them signed with personal messages to further commemorate a specific milestone in time. The seeds were already there in the human psyche but some industrious folks tapped into those cornerstone concepts and enhanced their utility by also adding a bit more of a creative and personalized punch as they were combined all together in a process known as scrapbooking.
While it was credited as having started in the UK during the nineteenth century, the scrapbooking industry doubled in size to a multibillion dollar industry right around the time my daughter was born which caught my wife’s attention. Scrapbooking ultimately became the chosen means to collect and document the events of those early childhood years with a little added creativity. While photo albums existed with pictures over those same years of my life, those albums lacked the journaling aspect from scrapbooking that adds more context and captures thoughts and sentiment that might also fade in time otherwise. Plus who couldn’t resist the stickers and colorful backgrounds that would add more visual appeal than just a plain white paged photo album would.
While a predominant number of scrapbooks were likely centered around children, acting as a year over year record of those early years, the products offered would also support creating other event themed albums such as ones focused on a wedding, an anniversary, or a vacation. Sports themed products were ones I first took advantage of to create a much better presentation for a shoebox full of newspaper clippings and photos that were among my relic collection. I now have an album that contains a record of all the sports I played from the first bat I swung in T-ball all the way up to the last time I took my helmet off as a high school football player.
While I was working on my sports scrapbook, my wife planted the seed of me pulling together something for my best friend Jack to give to him someday. That seed was planted 20 years ago and I am just about to harvest the fruit. We were thirty at the time so I decided that I would both reflect back and chronicle as much of the past as I could while more diligently documenting events over the next twenty years going forward and present him this scrapbook gift on his 50th birthday. The Pearl Jam trip from a couple of months ago that I previously wrote about here represents the last documented event I included in this scrapbook and it began with me writing him 50th birthday wishes from my 30 year-old self.
The scrapbook contains some really big life events such as graduations, marriages, and the births of our children but a good number of the pages simply document our efforts to experience things together like the Pearl Jam trip. I’ve secretly been collecting ticket stubs and other mementos to include along with photos and added a personal perspective through the writing components that went along with them. We already reflect back on some of these very same events whenever we connect without the need for the scrapbook. I’m sure he has his own pictures from those same events as well but I am hoping this collection and presentation will be something to better recall some of these shared events for posterity or remind him of ones that may not be as top of mind.
Since I have put two decades of time in compiling this gift, my intention was always to give it to him in person. Given the significance of the milestone, this also happens to involve a surprise party coordinated across multiple people all arriving without his knowledge to participate in the festivities over the course of the weekend. I will be boarding a plane soon and will finally share my gift; the significance of which is not lost on me. I am expecting him to perhaps be moved to tears even as he is cut from the same nostalgic cloth as me but I will be releasing the genie I have kept captive for two decades and will never find myself at this juncture again. I wanted to write the first part of this passage without knowing how the story unfolds so I will come back and conclude it after he has received my gift.
The weekend exceeded my expectations and they were pretty high already even if unfairly so after twenty years of buildup. I decided to give him my gift in a private moment and he was indeed moved to tears. He now has a tangible record that spans back with pages that include references to our first meeting all the way up to the our most recent Pearl Jam trip. I had also shared my work in progress with his Mom several years ago who has since passed away. We had a lovely time that day sharing stories about him and she ended up offering me some pictures of her own that I turned into a page credited to her.
One of our mutual childhood friends was among the out of state guests that flew in as part of the weekend celebration. His name is Jonas and he certainly has his own set of scrapbook worthy memories and experiences that could just as easily become their own pages in a scrapbook for Jack. Jonas was in fact included in several of the pages in what I had compiled which he also got to see. We talked about a number of things over the weekend as we reminisced at times driven by the scrapbook pages themselves but one of the things that stood out to me the most was a comment Jonas made about what he views as truly our most valuable currency: time. It’s the one thing we cannot make more of no matter how hard we try. We cannot buy more of it even with all the monetary currency in the world. Time is one of our precious limited resources that we invest or spend by the choices we make each new day with our given daily allocation. Any source of record such as a scrapbook represents our need to capture a record of its passage and document the return on our investment choices.
I placed one such investment criteria on my scrapbook gift by deciding the contents would reflect future returns for a twenty year investment. Even with this forward looking horizon, I reached this point spending my most valuable currency hour by hour; day by day. I could just as easily have arrived to this same juncture having spent the exact same allotment without a scrapbook in my hand. All of the exact same events would have been experienced that are reflected in those pages but by also choosing to invest a little of my most valuable currency along the way to document them, I now have some scrapbook memories to remind me anytime I feel the need to be reminded that I have been investing wisely.
