Family photo reflections

It's the cute, striped shirt that maked me look like such a stud.

Dad's in the mustache and the stylin' red jacket - which, honestly, has come back around to be about what a lot of my students, particularly the soccer players - wear today.

Grandpa - mom's dad - is holding me, and his father-in-law is leaning down on the right hand side.

I must've been about four years old when the picture was taken, and it's pretty clear that I wasn't all that enthused to be in the picture. Looking back now, however, I love the picture. It's the only photo that I can find that has four generations of my family - even if three of the guys are related only by way of marriage.

Over Thanksgiving, the family - ma, pa, sis, and I - sat down to sort through a big box of family photos that had been building up in Dad's closet for a few years. We got rid of some photos that we couldn't identify or that were just general scenery photos from some vacation out west. Then we spent a bunch of time labeling the backs of photos so that twenty...forty...a hundred years from now we'd be able to say who those people were.

And I got sad.

I love having the old family photos around, and someday we'll get that picture rail up so we can display them properly. And I'll be thrilled to be able to add some more to the collection once the even bigger box gets all sorted out.

But I got sad because The Girl and I decided finally - I'm pretty sure - this past summer that we're going to head into the great wide whatever as a pair instead of a trio or more. So I wonder why I'd bother sorting and labeling pictures. I know who's in 'em, and the rest of the immediate family knows who's in them.

But we at least had to label them so that...

...um...

the next gener...

I remember asking my mom a couple of years ago whether she was happy she had kids, because she's mentioned how much she doesn't like kids as a general rule. She's said that she didn't much care for the kids of her friends when she was first married and headed toward being a mom herself, and she doesn't so much like the grandkids of her friends now that she's moved into that age group.

She said, however, that she loved her kids - loved playing with us, loved raising us - more than anything else she'd ever done. She didn't know how she would have marked the passage of time if it weren't for us, how she would have justified her last thirty years if it weren't for raising us.

And I have no idea why I was labeling the photos...