Ancient History

One of the gifts I'm giving this Christmas is a family photo album, one for each brother (with wife and child).

You know the kind: ancient black & white pictures with fancy cut edges, stuck with little corners onto card sheets in an album, and each set protected by a glassine (tracing-paper like) sheet. Ancestors staring stonily, arranged in a studio or caught in bellbottoms and wild hair. Formal wedding photos, grainy images of the ancients and not-so-ancients. Lurking in every family's back cupboard is one of those. Time to make sure there's one lurking in my brother's cupboards too!

You know how HARD it is to find albums like that these days??? :) I searched the entire mall and finally found two - basically the same, just different colour covers - at precisely R100 price difference! Which, for a change (not the pushy type), I queried - and got them both at the lesser price. It helps that I'm a regular customer and the manager recognized me.

Last night I sat down with my box of old photos, looking for pictures to scan, print on photo paper, edge (got the fancy scissors!) and place in albums (finally found the little corner thingies!). There is nothing - NOTHING! - like a box of old photos to give the memory a good jolt. Mostly pleasant jolts, except for a couple of old boyfriends and a reminder of rejection or hurt.

Last week I was sorting through images on my computer and came across the ones my dad spent ages scanning from slides and photos, burnt onto a CD for each of us kids. A priceless gift.

Combined, these two mediums give a pretty accurate picture of our family history, of all we've been through and how we've grown up and grown old. I can see my son in my own photos at his age and younger. I can only laugh at some of the clothes we used to wear (like purple satin ties with yellow jerseys/sweaters!). There are the "braces" stages some went through, and a record of girls my brothers dated. There's dad pulling funny faces, and mom with her so-70's outfits. There's me - fat, thin, fat again. Some creepy boyfriends, my son's dad, high school mates.

And then there was one photo that totally hit home. A family picture, one of the few professionally-posed ones. I was just out of high school, my younger brothers still scholars. Mom and dad a lot younger. Nothing really unusual.

Except that I've completely turned into my mom!

Same face-shape, same expression. Oh. My. Goodness. :)