Reminiscence

Preserving our stories, one day at a time

Block and Tackle © by Dave Graham

Reminiscence is a heady drug to take. Spinning your way through those hardcover photo albums of your childhood, with their cellophane separators and tacky backing mounts, peering into the faded glory of 3x5" pictures on Kodak paper is a wholly different experience to walking back through a digital catalog. The intent may be the same, but the clinical nature of digital versus print leaves something to be desired. The experience is less kinesthetic and more clicky, prone to the droll and boring gyrations of a mouse or trackpad and a few audible clicks every once in a while.

Yet, we do it because there are still the traces of memory embedded in our gray matter, of more halcyon times of playing in the streets from sun-up to sun-down, of halogen-bright streetlamps, the barge-sized Cadillacs, Chevys, and Buicks with whitewalls and wires, and the jerk of rotary phones dials as numbers are entered, one by one.

These memories, perhaps shaded differently in your experience versus mine, make the digital tolerable. The certainty of memory, whether on film or in bits and bytes, still has a necessary gravity that demands fulfillment. It's insatiable in its need for preservation, regardless of medium.

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