The Missing Decade
Why didn't I take more photos?
Every now and then, I scroll back through the camera roll on my phone and marvel at how many pointless photos I take on a weekly basis.
The cat? An embarrassing amount of storage space is devoted to His Highness.
A sunset that I must have found particularly pleasing.
A pot of flowers from Costco. A groundhog in our backyard. A snowfall from a few months ago. Is there anything too mundane to record for iPhone posterity?
And yes, there are even a few random pictures of my husband and me, mostly at family events.
Pre-iPhone, I have boxes of photos from our early family life. Dozens of snapshots of our oldest daughter as a baby. Look, she smiled! She rolled over! Wait, here’s an outfit she’s never worn before — get the camera!
Further back, my husband and I have some carefully preserved black and white photos from our early childhoods. (As the youngest of four, there were precious few of me. Not a complaint; just a fact. And I can feel all the youngest children out there nodding in solidarity.)
I’ve got a few dozen yellowing snaps from high school, another assortment from college.
You know what I don’t have? Photos of me as a young adult. It’s like I vacated the earth in 1983 and returned 10 years later as a bride swathed in champagne-colored silk. (What all the photographers say is true: Wedding photos are a good investment.)
I have no photos of my husband (then boyfriend) and me at Graffiti, the late, great Pittsburgh music venue we frequented on a weekly basis in the late 1980s.
No photos of my first car, my beloved if not entirely reliable 1974 Fiat.
Even worse: No photos of my first apartment. I don’t have a single image of that tiny Pittsburgh studio with a Murphy bed that popped out of the wall. I loved that bed. I loved the early 1900s black and white tile bathroom. I loved – most of all – having a place of my own.
These memories exist only in my mind. And maybe that’s ok. Because if I close my eyes, I can still conjure up the slightly musty smell of the Murphy bed.
I can feel the two porcelain spigots on the old-fashioned bathroom sink, and how you had to swipe your hands side-to-side to get the proper balance of hot and cold water, and how it was easy to scald yourself if you lingered too long on the hot side.
I can hear the clunking of the radiator pipes, and the slightly muffled sound of How Will the Wolf Survive? by Los Lobos, coming from my neighbor’s stereo across the hall. (An album, by the way, I later grew to love on its own merits. Not so much when it was keeping me up at night.)
When I ponder these things, I’m reminded that our past lives exist in all our senses, not just in photos. That third floor walk-up — and the happy season of life it represented — can be mine anytime I delve back into my memories.
But what I wouldn’t give for a snapshot of that sweet black and white bathroom.
A version of this column ran in The Beaver County Times on May 9, 2021.