Memories

After their films were developed, my folks would go through the resulting prints and slides, pulling images that were worth distributing, displaying or adding to a photo album. They wouldn’t toss the rest, but instead returned them to the box or envelope they came in. That box or envelope found its way into a larger box in the attic, soon to be forgotten. While the home movies were brought out on rare occasions, eventually they, too, found their way to a dusty box in the attic.

My parents moved to San Diego for the final chapter of their lives. In the process, the many large boxes of slides, prints and movies were stashed in various out-of-the-way places within their large new home. We kids, wanting to share some of our memories with our own children, helped our parents search for the home movies, but to no avail. Mom and dad concluded that they must have been lost in the move, but we refused to give up hope. And indeed, after our parents’ passing, while scouring the house for personal items, we hit pay dirt.

I volunteered to sift through, and then digitize, the best of our parents’ many films and images. There being so many, however, for now I’ve chosen to focus on the movies and the slides, leaving the prints for the future. Not having a movie projector, and knowing that each small reel likely contains at least some amount of usable material, I took the home movies, unwatched, to AV Workshop on Woodside Road for digitization (While there are other companies that do the same thing, I sleep better knowing that my parent’s priceless memories remain within easy reach — and I like supporting local businesses). Once the movies are in digital form, I’ll review the results and send copies to my siblings.

As for the slides, for the last week or so I’ve been plowing through those. Fortunately, not only do I still own a slide projector, I also have a “stack loader” that obviates the need to insert each slide individually into a carousel.

Because my parents only minimally curated their slide collection, a number of the images are out of focus or poorly exposed. Then, because many of them are from my parent’s travels (and my grandparents’, my dad having apparently inherited many of his father’s slides), and because my father mostly took pictures of buildings, scenery or unrelated people, most of the well-photographed images have no real meaning for us kids — though surely, they would have evoked rich memories for my parents. By only keeping those showing family members, close family friends or locations or objects that mean something to us, I eliminated roughly 90% of the thousands and thousands of slides with which I started.

Having reduced the slides to a manageable number, I’m now organizing them into meaningful categories. Next, I’ll look closely at each to ensure they are truly worth keeping. Finally, I’ll digitize the lot. I could do that myself, but given the quantity involved and the time it’d take, I expect I’ll take them to AV Workshop instead.

Wading through a sea of 35 mm slides may have been a chore, but it’s deepened my insight into what my parents valued. Although what they chose to remember, and, by omission, what they did not, isn’t a huge surprise, I laughed when I saw that, as one might expect, they took far more photos of their firstborn than they did of the rest of us. With a tinge of sadness, I find myself recycling many, many slides that undoubtedly held many memories for my parents. But those memories had significance only to them, and without them here to impart that significance, the slides have no value to we who remain. Whereas the slides that I’m preserving either evoke common memories or provide meaningful insight into times gone by. And in doing so they deepen my connection with my parents, and give me some solace.

Greg Wilson is the creator of Walking Redwood City, a blog inspired by his walks throughout Redwood City and adjacent communities. He can be reached at greg@walkingRedwoodCity.com. Follow Greg on Twitter @walkingRWC.