Reminiscing

My wife likes to have the television on when she’s busy on the sofa with some project or another. Sometimes she actually watches what’s on but mostly its just background noise. Occasionally I will come downstairs and she will have some impossibly gorgeous snowy cabin scene up on the screen, the sounds of an unseen roaring fire in the background. Other times it will be an endless scrolling slideshow of every photograph we’ve taken in the digital era, all 10,000+ of them. She was in the kitchen the other night making dinner when I walked through the living room and saw a photograph of my Dad with my nieces Jenny and Christina around him, all smiling brightly. It was taken at the beach many years ago. The girls looked so young and carefree. Dad looked proud and contented.

I sat down on the loveseat and watched a series of random pictures scroll by, no two of them having any connection to what came before or after. There was one of Pam and me along with Patrick and Sarah in front of a restaurant in Nashville. It was the night we met her for the first time. There was another of Lucy when she was a six month old puppy. Her fur was short and blonde and she was smiling at the camera. I watched those pictures roll by for maybe ten minutes, each of them evoking a memory, each of them a snapshot in time, a glimpse into my past.

It is an odd sensation, the reminiscing that photographs produces in me. On the one hand it warms the heart to be reminded of the joys you have experienced in life, on the other it ushers in a surprising melancholy, a longing for a simpler time, only it wasn’t simpler back then. Each year of our lives has its own difficulties. Its only after we survive and look back that we tell ourselves that life was simpler back then. But mostly its an overwhelming sense of the relentlessness of time. It stops for no one and reminds us that as each day passes into history we will never get them back. We get one shot. The most important day of our lives, the one with the most opportunity is always…this one.