Category Archives: Memories

About Hockey

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This one was probably in my secret collection.

[A annotated hockey throwback – I guess this would be a backhand shot?]

Now that Easter is over, our household has entered the next holiday season: Hockey. I can call it a holiday because just like after a big meal at Christmas or Easter, it’s difficult to get my husband off the couch – unless, of course, he’s actually going to a game. I consider it fortunate if Rick agrees to do something else with me if the Oilers are on TV. [We’re currently on vacation, in a city whose team thankfully did not make it into the playoffs, while Rick’s beloved Oilers did. But my husband, while he still loves his hockey, forgot to factor in that he’d be missing some first-round playoff hockey in the safety of his own province when we planned this getaway. Clearly, he now has too many other things on his mind.] It’s also not worth it if the activity is something where he can talk a lot, openly reminding me what he’s missing while he could be enriching his mind with the edifying commentary of Ron MacClean and Don Cherry. [We all know what happened to Don Cherry but Ron is still holding down the fort.]

I’m not sure exactly why I’m not a hockey fan. Along with Edmonton [football team] games, it was one of the times I really enjoyed, because most or all of the family would gather around the television like it was a fireplace on a frosty Canadian evening.  But, out of a family of seven kids, I am probably the only one who has never watched an entire game on TV. I’m more the type that comes in for the commercials and goes to fix snacks when the game resumes. My brothers were diehard Black Hawks fans: it was a banner Saturday night in our house when the Hawks were on and a cause for real celebration if they won. My two sisters had more focused interests, namely Bobby Orr and Bobby Clark, but they, too, actually watched the game.

When I became a teenager, however, I did begin to show an interest in hockey, but it manifested itself in a covert Wayne Gretzky newspaper clipping collection. You see, in my house the Edmonton Oilers had become the equivalent of watching Oprah Winfrey win another Emmy for Best Talk Show. [This is called Toronto Maple Leaf Fan Syndrome now.] But Wayne was only a few years older than me and his long flowing locks did the same thing to me as Guy Lafleur did for other women 10 years earlier. [R.I.P Guy Lafleur April 22, 2022.] Years later I married an avid Oilers fan (begrudgingly accepted by my big brothers). When I confessed to Rick years later, after the said clipping collection had gone the way of the burn barrel, that I had once harboured a secret Wayne Gretzky adoration, he said he would have felt the same way if he was a girl. [My mother saved those clippings for years after I had left home. She must have liked him, too.]

My three sons have yet to develop any sort of attention span when daddy settles down to watch a hockey game. All I have to do is dangle the Berenstain Bears or Dr. Suess in front of them and I have company. But they love wearing the Oilers hats that Dad got them and pretty soon they’ll probably sit with him for longer that it takes the theme song to play out. [This has definitely come to pass. Now, if we’re all together, WE gather around the TV like it’s a fireplace.] At that point, I’ll have probably have time to do my thing. Or maybe I’ll actually have to learn to enjoy watching hockey as Rick is always hoping. Chances are good that I’ll be hanging out in the living room, still doing my thing, but enjoying the four of them jumping and cheering when the right team scores. [I actually do enjoy watching hockey now, but even more, I love being part of Team Donily – of which Oil loyalty is a given. Go, Oilers, Go!]

About Nostalgia

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Photo by Damla Özkan on Unsplash

I tend to write a lot about memory and things from the past – specifically my memory and my past. It’s not that I don’t like living in the present, but I am a ruminator of days gone by when it comes to putting things down on paper (or computer). Maybe it has to do with my reticence to form an early opinion – you won’t find me Tweet-ing or Status-ing a heck of a lot. I read the backlist of books more often than new releases. I like to cull pictures and memorabilia five or ten years later – when I have some sense of what’s really important to me.

What’s important to me is subjective, but as a memory keeper for my family I do sometimes hold onto things that I think maybe my boys will one day agree is important: their favorite t-shirts from teenager-hood, picture books from toddlerhood and even some baby teeth and the locks of first haircuts. Rick and I also have things saved from our teenage and toddler years and then, beyond that, I have things that I saved of my mother’s – greeting cards from us kids, her wedding invitation collection and a stack of Edmonton Journal comics pages that I cannot recycle. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

A couple weeks ago Rick and I wandered into the Old Strathcona Antique Mall, a place burgeoning with nostalgia, complete with price tags. We have a few things we might want to sell so we were looking for similar things – and we quickly learned we weren’t going to get rich. But it was fascinating to see what was deemed saveable and saleable: a used paper cup with a John Deere emblem, a framed and signed photo of Wayne Gretzky on ice only wearing skates and gym shorts circa 1980-something, hundreds of mugs and badges and signs emblazoned with old logos and all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books ten times over.

As we wandered the aisles, we did a lot of “I remember that!” and “My auntie had one of those!” and also plenty of “I can’t believe that someone would want that/pay for that/saved that!” But then, everyone’s memory is subjective – and important. I recently read Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which chronicles the history of the Los Angeles Central Library told with the through-line of the devastating fire that nearly wiped it out in the 1986. I found it so interesting that the library wasn’t just the storehouse of books, magazines and DVDs. Of course, I’m aware that most libraries have collections or archives of some sort. But a large library like the one in Los Angeles also is the repository of old maps, single subject book collections (like about rubber or oranges) donated posthumously by a passionate collector’s family, and any and all paraphernalia deposited there by defunct social action groups. It’s like they think everything is important.

And it is. Maybe not to you or me, but to someone else it could the connection to a history they thought was lost. Or never knew about at all. It reminds me of an episode of Marie Kondo’s show Tidying Up, where a retired couple had never cleaned out the house they inherited from the husband’s parents, just moved in themselves. Once they started sifting and purging their closets, old photos surfaced and antiques they never knew about – and never would have if someone hadn’t saved it in the first place.

I’m not saying we should save everything – gosh, people are paying too much for storage lockers as it is. But curating a collection of things important to you – in a bureau or a box or a book – is actually good way to secure your place in the future, a way to remember and be remembered.

About Plagiarism

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Me: circa 1973.

I am a plagiarist from way back.

When I was in grade one, my teacher (Mrs. W.) gave our class a writing project – an exciting culmination to the whole “learning to read” thing. She showed us how to fold a few regular papers in half and staple them at the folded edge to create a booklet, upon which we could immortalize our words and illustrations.

Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore. So much for immortality.

But it is my first remembered effort at publication. And I do recall – rather clearly – both the text and my drawings, probably because of the traumatic circumstances that surrounded my budding authorship. Namely, when my minimus opus had made the round-trip journey from my desk to the teacher’s and back again, I discovered that it had been marred with the frightening letter “C”. It was my first rejection letter as a writer.

Why, you ask, did my teacher NOT LIKE my story? (Imagine me as a miniature person, with short crooked bangs and spindly arms, feigning a thrust of a dagger to the heart. Actually, see the picture above, taken sometime before Mrs. W. crushed me.)

What had I written, you ask? Let’s see, it went something like this: We all live in a yellow submarine… Yeah, that was the start of it anyways, with accompanying pictures of stick people looking out of the portholes of a yellow spaceship-y thing. It went on like this for a riveting eight to ten pages.

Okaaaaay, so technically I stole the idea from the Beatles. At least I can’t be blamed for my taste, even though I did gravitate at that age to the Ringo songs. Maybe I wasn’t reaching as high as I could have. It doesn’t really matter because I was just borrowing a tried-and-true line so that I could learn how to write a story. Also, I must have missed that day in grade one that we learned about copyright law.

Needless to say, this memory bothered me for a long time – not (necessarily) because of the “C” but because I felt I had done something really wrong. That is, until I discovered Austin Kleon, one of my favorite creative people. No one vindicates the fledgling (and also the mature) artist better than he does. I’ve written about him before. Steal Like An Artist is now ten years old and his blog is way older. Both are an homage to how artists learn by stealing.

This is, after all, where all artists begin – by copying. Picasso didn’t always paint those crazy limp-necked, weird-eyed bird people: he only did that stuff after he drew a whole bunch of (recognizable) bowls of fruit. And even the Beatles – who I first riffed off – started out as a cover band. It’s only after you imitate the giants who came before you enough times are you able to jump off their shoulders and start doing your own thing. And sometimes, just writing down someone else’s lyrics so you can memorize them or filling out a paint-by-number is good enough to satisfy the creative urge within us. That doesn’t make it any less of a creative endeavor and it always delivers that positive, constructive feeling of putting your own hand to something.

Check out Steal Like An Artist in a special 10th anniversary edition! It’s an eminently readable book – with pictures! – and plenty of encouragement for all.

About TV

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Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

Recently, while reading through Amy K. Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, I was amused by her “Table of Most Memorable TV Shows and Movies”. AKR was born shortly before me so a lot of her choices were happily familiar – The Carol Burnett Show, The Electric Company, The Love Boat and (not the re-booted) Fantasy Island. Thinking about them took me back to the living room(s) of my childhood – how differently we used to watch television.

First of all – the word television: does it even apply if you watch a show on your laptop or tablet or phone? Often you don’t even hear the phrase “I’m watching TV” anymore. Instead, we’re often watching Netflix or YouTube. I do still watch THE TV – the news, the shows we’ve PVR’d and of course, Netflix (and Disney and Prime) when we’re looking for commercial-free binge-ability.

What struck me this last week while my husband was away for a week-long convention and I wasn’t watching any of “our shows”, was how different the experience of watching TV was from when I was a kid. The physically obvious: there was no such thing as a remote control. If I wanted to change the channel, I would have to get up off the couch (or reach up from where I was laying on my stomach in front of the TV) and turn the channel dial. No buttons, no electronic lights. If my Dad or any of my older siblings wanted to change the channel, again, I would get up off the couch and turn the channel for them. (Little siblings everywhere were a prototype for the universal remote.)

And channels? The word barely registered as plural. We had three and sometimes one didn’t work. And that was only after my dad had a rotor installed so we could actually turn the giant antennae on our house to catch our choice of network: CBC (which was CKSA Lloydminster), CTV (CFRN in Edmonton) and if the airwaves aligned correctly, we might also get CITV from Edmonton, which was somehow kind of cooler because it was a new station in the ’70s. Our antenna wasn’t quite like a tuneable satellite dish – Rick’s grampa had one the size of a hot tub parked on his front lawn – but it did the trick.

Because that was all I knew. I memorized the TV schedules (didn’t we all?) – at different times during my growing up years Sundays was The Waltons, Fridays was Dallas (and Good Rockin’ Tonight after my parents went to bed), Thursdays was St. Elsewhere, Saturdays was The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show. And if you missed it, you missed it. If you weren’t home the day that Mary Ingalls became blind or Mary Richards finally moved out of her studio apartment and then you missed the re-run (and who knew when that would happen?), then you might have to wait until the nineties or the aughts to find the show on VHS or DVD.

As a teenager, I would often spend a week of my summer vacation staying with my older siblings once they moved to The City and graduated to the fascinating world of cable TV. Most of my “vacation” with them was spent with the television while they were off at work. For the first time, I watched The Price is Right, Eight is Enough, even Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – all offerings that my local networks didn’t offer. While I was there, I also read all their magazines or listened to all their record albums, but I could also ask (nicely) to borrow them when I went home. Cable TV stayed where it was so that kind of made it special.

Isn’t it funny how we need the entertainment, the news, the sports? One of the first things my roommate Reva and I did when we moved into an apartment before we started university was to sign up for cable TV. Annnnnnd Superchannel which was (gasp!) Only Movies. If the U of A had offered a course on Terms of Endearment, I would have aced it. Because there still wasn’t that much choice when I turned on the television. If the choice was between Terms or studying for mid-terms, the TV probably won – at least until the panic set in 24 hours before said midterm.

And now, if I need to go to the bathroom or fix a snack in the middle of a show, I just hit pause and go. There was a moment last week when I did just that and it triggered the memory of how we used to only do that during commercials. As soon as the break happened, when watching TV in real time, you would run to the bathroom or the kitchen because otherwise you would miss the show. And I kinda missed that. For maybe a minute. Then I sat back down with my snack and resumed my show.

About the Fridge Door Art Gallery

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[It’s been a while since I did a throwback. I wrote this one is about the accidental art gallery that happens in so many kitchens.]

            Show me a person with nothing on their fridge door and I’ll show you someone who just had a new refrigerator delivered. The metal exterior and wide-open space seems to lend itself to magnetizing everything and anything to the fridge door – well at least anything that a magnet can hold up. Before you can say “What’s for supper?”, someone has christened that gleaming exterior with a take-out menu and matching magnet.

            The fridge door is really a microcosm of the household, showcasing what’s important and memorable to the family that lives here. At the very least, it’s a great place to stick stuff that you’re not really sure what to do with. Nearly every home has at least one or two photographs on their icebox, a collection that usually grows into a multi-people collage just shortly after school pictures and Christmas cards come out. And of course, if you’re a parent or a grandparent, or even a neighbor to a family with children, chances are you’re going to have some wax crayon, glitter glue and egg carton creation adhered to the fridge with at least a dozen magnets or more likely with some glitter glue that seeped to the back of the project. Because the fact of the matter is children are prolific artists. Even if your three-year-old had just scribbled a two-second blue circle with a nearly dried-up marker, they will insist that you hang it on the fridge because (apparently) that blue circle is a picture of you and it goes with the series of twenty-five identical pictures of you already layered on the fridge door. (You probably never guessed you were so complex until you had children.)

            But the short people in your household aren’t the only culprits. The fridge may be the place where you stick a funny comic strip you cut out from the newspaper (usually mirroring your life is such an eerie manner you wonder how the cartoonist got into your house.) In our home, the refrigerator is close enough to the garbage where I go through the mail. Therefore, the fridge is the place that all those reminder notices from the dentist get pinned up. There are other reminders, too. I have something up that’s called “Prayer for a Tired, Irritable Parent”. Although I don’t actually read it that often, just seeing the title reminds me to be thankful for noisy, wrestling children because (apparently) that’s a sure sign that they’re healthy. Well, healthy except for reaching abnormally high sugar levels on cookie baking days. And another clipping encourages me to be thankful for things like high gas bills because it means we’re warm and for snug fitting clothes because it means we have enough to eat.

            Which most of us do. And because the Pavlovian response to any sort of anxiety, from high gas bills to wrestling children to “How am I going to get this glob of petrified glitter glue off my brand-new fridge?” is to open the fridge door. So many of us will use this spot to strategically display some sort of deterrent to doing just that. One does need to weigh the matter carefully, since fridge doors are somewhat like public property. Everyone who walks into your home is going to look at what’s on your fridge and some will even go a step further and check the contents inside. (These are good people to play the marbles-in-the-medicine-chest-trick on.)

If you choose to put up an inspiring picture of yourself at your fittest and thinnest, some may look at it and think, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” If you put up a picture of yourself at your worst, some may look at it and think, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” If you put up a picture of some attractive girl (which really doesn’t work any way), you may have a problem with your husband making too many trips to the refrigerator and some clueless people will still say, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” And finally, if you put up a picture of some attractive male, people will assume your marriage is on the rocks.

Which is why I have a nice, unassuming calorie wheel on the fridge that will tell me that eating that cookie dough myself will sentence me to seven and a half hours on the treadmill. Seeing this induces such stress, I find myself struggling to open the fridge door, anyways. Luckily, I can’t. It’s been sealed shut with glitter glue.

About Jell-O

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Tell me everything you know about Jell-O. This was the prompt I came across this week in a writing book.

I hadn’t thought about Jell-O that much until a couple months ago when my nieces came here for a day during that surprise extra week they had off after Christmas. We talked about school and Covid and teachers and masks and hot lunches and that’s when I found out that THEY NEVER GOT JELL-O ANYMORE. With whipped cream. And that this was one of the great disappointments they’ve had to bear during this pandemic. (I’m not really sure why but I took their word for it.) Since they would be at my house for a few hours, I suggested we make some Jell-O. If we started right then, it would be ready for afternoon snack.

Of course, I had some packages of Jell-O around because – Hello? – I was raised by my mom who became a housewife in the fifties. That’s when the necessary refrigeration to make Jell-O became de rigeur. As we boiled some water, I told the girls that when I was their age, I helped my mom make Jell-O every Saturday night for Sunday dinner’s dessert. Nothing about the process has changed: empty one package of Jell-O (or jelly powder if you eschew the name brand) into one cup of very hot water – measured with a Pyrex measuring cup, of course – and stir until dissolved. Then add one cup of very cold water and stir again. Mostly I “helped” because Mom would always pour me a teensy glass of the hot Jell-O water before she put the rest into a cut glass bowl to set in the fridge. It was like a warm liquid lollipop. Usually it was fake strawberry flavor, sometimes it was fake lime or fake orange. I don’t think it was ever fake grape.

Nothing could be simpler. Mom once got frustrated with someone “who couldn’t even make Jell-O!” – sort of the way you would get mad at someone who couldn’t boil water. However, everything seemed easy for Mom in the kitchen – she was such a good cook. But that didn’t exclude putting Jell-O on the menu every weekend.

It also did not mean that every time I saw Jell-O in the Co-op Cafeteria, I didn’t want some. The whipped cream they put on it was part of the allure – that and those sexy cafeteria sherbet glasses. (You can buy six dozen of those for $237.00 online – but that doesn’t include shipping.) I didn’t have any fancy bowls, but I did have some leftover whipping cream in the fridge from Christmas, so I whipped it up for the girls when the Jell-O was ready. It was a pretty easy thing to do for them.

I guess that is part of the charm of Jell-O – it is easy. But another part is that you have to wait for it. (Unless you just want to drink hot Jell-O water.) When my boys had their wisdom teeth out, I made sure that I made Jell-O before we left for the dentist’s office. Jell-O marked both the low bar and the high bar of my career as a mom. Easy to do, but you had to remember to do it.

Got any Jell-O memories? There’s always room for Jell-O – and memories.

About Ukraine

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Our Lady of Ukraine

It’s been a sobering week watching events play out over the borders between Ukraine and Russia. I sometimes think that I’m not a political person, but there’s something about hearing the words “World War Three” that make me sit up and take notice. It’s actually made a lot of people notice: countries, companies and individuals are imposing sanctions on Russia and voicing their support for Ukraine. Even Saturday Night Live made New York’s Ukrainian choir Dumka the headliner last Saturday and another choir sang the Ukrainian national anthem before an NHL game in Winnipeg. With the modern-day capability of being able to film everything, nothing that the Big Bully of Eastern Europe does goes unnoticed.

One look at a map, comparing the size of Ukraine to Russia, is enough to make one furious. It reminds me of something my preschool son Simon once said to a playground bully: “Hey you mean guy! Leave him alone!”

When I was in university some thirty plus years ago, I took a course one spring session in Ukrainian Folklore. It was actually a required course for anyone who had been hired to work at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village for the summer as an interpreter – someone who dresses up in period costume and provides an immersive experience for visitors. I wasn’t working there, my part-time job as a bank teller was too good to give up, but I wanted to knock off some credits towards my degree and thought it would be an easy mark. After all, I am Ukrainian – I should know this stuff.

It turns out I got a lot more than I bargained for, namely a new minor for my degree. I fell in love with the subject – especially of material culture, the objects that remind us of who we are and what we do as a particular people. A lot of it was due to an infectious teacher, Dr. Andriy Nahachewsky, one of the few professors whose full name I remember. We watched the movie Taras Bulba in class, we learned the poetry of Taras Schevchenko, and we started calling any person named Terry by their new nickname, Taras. But a good part of it was the awakening of an affinity to my heritage, the pride that comes with identifying with a historical people.

It was during my time at the University of Alberta, taking lots of classes from the Slavic Studies department, that the Soviet Union fell apart. Nations that had supposedly been absorbed started to rear their nationalistic heads, those heads adorned, so to speak, in Ukraine with vinoks and sheepskin hats. It was heartening to see that self-determination was so stubborn. The nations were still there, no matter how hard the Soviet Union had tried to subdue them.

After Little Simon stood up to a much bigger boy on the playground that day, we found out that it was actually his own little brother that he was bullying. People, just like countries, want their own self-determination. Russia is the economically and geographically bigger than Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean that Russia gets to boss Ukraine around. It’s heartening to see the world stand united to tell the Mean Guy Russia to leave Ukraine alone.

About the Perfect Day

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About thirteen years ago, our family took an epic trip to the other side of the world to visit friends that lived there. Besides the obvious attraction of reuniting with our peeps, along with free accommodations and translation services, it was a warm country surrounded by ocean. In other words, a perfect holiday destination, completely different from our temperamental country of origin. It was a vacation I’m remembering wistfully today, in the midst of our February deep-freeze, as it were.

Towards the end of our time together, we crammed all eight of us – with suitcases – into their car and made a pilgrimage to the sea. Our destination from their inland city was less than Vermilion to Edmonton, but it took us all day to get there – we actually broke up the trip into two days. Because: Indonesian roads, traffic and time are just not the same as in North America. We arrived at our beach house in the pitch dark and fell exhausted into bed, the roar of the ocean so loud we thought there was a good chance we would be swept away in the night.

The next morning, when we cracked open our bedroom door – after checking that we were still, indeed, alive – we were greeted by Dave who had (bless him) made coffee and opened up an entire wall of doors to a porch where we could sip and stare at the ocean in our front yard. Not long after, we took a walk along the beach until our crew found a place to play in the surf. We spent the rest of the day exploring the jungle (and somebody’s fantastic treehouse – even though we weren’t actually invited to), alternating with dips in the pool and playing beach volleyball. When the sun disappeared, we ate a perfectly grilled supper of marlin steaks, prawns the size of our hands, and fresh vegetables. And then we played all the card games that Lynn could think of until we were too tired to stay awake anymore, even though we didn’t want the day – or our time with our friends – to end.

At one point that afternoon, when the sun was high and we were cooling off in the pool, Dave pronounced that it was A Perfect Day. It is something that has always stuck with me. While I don’t usually pine for sandy beaches, there is something to be said for the resetting nature of time by the water. That day we had nowhere to be but HERE AND NOW. The day progressed slowly and quickly. We spent time outside, we walked, we were curious and explored, we got a little wet and sweaty, we ate some pretty simple food and we were with people we loved. It’s a pretty simple equation.

And one that could actually be replicated anywhere. Sure, a beautiful exposure to ocean or mountain is helpful but it’s also good to remember that Perfect Days are just the sum of Simple Things. Plus, the time and the awareness to realize that Perfect can be Now. Even in February. In Alberta.

About Romance

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[Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash]

[Another throwback: here’s what Valentine’s Day looked like for us twenty years ago!]

My husband and I are approaching a benchmark in our marriage. With nearly ten years behind us since we uttered those fateful words, “I do”, you would think that the idea of romance has been crystallized in our mind. After all, we’ve been living together for a decade. We should know what turns one another’s crank. And for the most part we do. Rick cleaning the bathrooms in our house is infinitely more romantic to me than say, laying down his coat over a mud puddle for me to walk over. (Don’t forget: I still do the laundry.) And if I would just sit next to my husband on the couch for an entire hockey game and actually pay attention, he would consider himself the luckiest man in the world.

What’s that? That doesn’t sound very romantic to you? Ah, well, don’t you remember? We have three small children. When it comes to romance, our paradigm has definitely shifted from the days of dating and smooching and holding hands. Not that that stuff is unheard of around here. Let’s just say we’ve become a lot more, uh, efficient. The trouble with Valentine’s Day is that it’s all about someone else telling you what to do and what to say in order to guarantee the appropriate swooning from your mate. And the flower and chocolate shops aren’t completely to blame. Let’s take a look at the origin of Valentine’s Day.

Although many myths surround this lovers’ day, Valentine’s Day is named for a priest, the patron saint of lovers, who secretly married couples against the wishes of the emperor. Erroneously, Mr. Emperor thought that this ban on marriage would encourage more men to join the army. It’s sort of a tragic Romeo-and-Juliet-forbidden-love-thing, which incidentally was also set in Italy. Hello? Italy? How are we supposed to get to the birthplace of romance if we’ve only accumulated 157 airmiles in the last 10 years? And no wonder those personal ads seeking romance always claim an affinity for candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach. Italy is surrounded by water! And Valentine’s Day was invented in the Middle Ages. They didn’t even have electricity back then! Clears things up a lot, doesn’t it?

You have to give credit to those Italians, though. Notorious as they are for their romantic reputation, they also have big families. Maybe we have the whole idea wrong over here in North America. Romance isn’t for twitter-pated teenagers. It’s for the seasoned veterans of love who know romance doesn’t have to fall between the confines of red roses and serenades. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Romance CAN fit in between the laundry and the bedtime stories. But sometimes, a babysitter is a pretty good thing.  

About Cell Phone Photography

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Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

I have to organize my photos. Well, not all of them, but there’s a whole 2021 backlog on my phone that I really need to go through and then delete off the Cloud or else I’ll start getting those warning messages that my phone is NOT backed up and that Certain Doom will thus occur. I hate those messages so much that last year, instead of doing the work of paring down what needed to be stored in my phone, I just paid the extra for storage. Now I am a slave to Apple to the tune of $1.35 per month.

Okay, so that’s not a terrible price for ensuring that my memories don’t disappear – it’s only about the cost of one third of a Starbucks Grande Caramel Macchiato (with oat milk). The cost of Starbucks drinks helps me to relativize a lot of purchases that, in theory, should be a lot more important than coffee. Like photos. Like memories.

But when I do get around to looking at the photos from my phone that Magically-Instantly download to my computer to see what I can delete off my phone, this is what I find: screenshots of memes and their cropped versions that I sent to someone, screenshots of my phone mid-podcast to remind me to go back and listen to something again (which I almost never do) and screenshots of texts to remind me to do something. Oh, and some genuine photos.

I’ve learned not to delete them all. While many of these things are actual pictures of people I love blowing out birthday candles or beside the huge pile of snow they just shovelled or selfies of a group of us hiking in Canmore or just me on the trails in Vermilion Provincial Park, the memes and the texting and the podcast screenshots are also moments in time. I save a lot of conversations with my kids or my husband (either for future enjoyment or for future proof of things that moms and wives need to prove to their beloveds). A snap of a podcast shows me what I was into at the time I took it. And All Those Covid memes will (hopefully soon) remind me of when we wore masks and bought a lot of toilet paper.

Some stuff has to go: the price of SPAM at Costco, the mysterious & blurry shots of my shoes, the doubles and tens and twenties when my phone was accidentally in burst mode. But the random and odd pictures that my phone seems to take of its own accord have the flavor of those old time real photos from the end of the Kodak camera reel: slightly exposed, weirdly angled and capturing something ethereal that just might be happy to look back at twenty years from now.

Maybe I don’t have to organize my photos just yet. Maybe I’ll just time-capsule them instead in a folder on my computer or buy a round of Starbucks for a year’s worth of storage. And then twenty years from now, like looking through a shoebox of photos, I can then wonder what the heck I was thinking. Or not.