A way of mirroring my grandmother in an attempt be the best ancestor I can be.
I wish to leave many things unto my descendants, one of them being definitive proof that I had friends.
I want them to know that I had fun. That I saw the world. That I, with absolute certainty, did hood rat shit with my friends. So that whether or not I’m still there for them to ask me about my life, they’ll have photographic evidence that can testify on my behalf. A legacy of joy. Physical proof that joy and love and communion existed for me. That is what I wish to pass down. A legacy of moments punctuated by wide grins and accompanied by the sound of laughter so durable it can be heard generations later.
This wasn’t something I just came up with, of course. This was something I was taught. Brought to you by Betty, the same 82-year-old superstar of a grandmother that put me on to mailing letters and cards, I present to you the art of documentation through photo albums.
“Lia!!!”
Betty would call from her room. I’d make my way to her from wherever I was at the moment. The split level 1960s home that she and my grandfather raised their five children in was not built with sound proofing in mind, so I can hear her literally from anywhere.
“Yes?” I’d reply, praying she’d only be asking a simple task of me like going to get the mail or bringing her a piece of fruit.
“Go out on the back patio,” she’d begin before I internally groaned. “, and go to the second shelf on the left. Find the photo album with the pink flowers on it. It should be next to the one with red flowers.”
These relatively simple directions were not, as you can expect, simple at all. The back patio was a historian’s dream but a grandchild’s nightmare. Furniture from the 60s, t-shirts from 1980s family reunions, boxes of toilet paper, the winter blankets, everything was back there. And when asked to go search in there for anything, the next 30 minutes of your life were guaranteed to be consumed in the blue carpeted enclosed patio with absolutely no A/C.
Though a tedious task, being asked to retrieve a specific photo album was more of a treasure hunt than a chore. The issue was that Betty has a ton of photo albums spanning from around the 1930s till now and about half of them have faded flowers of several colors on the cover. The fun part of this, however, is I get a chance to see the joy of people I ain’t never met. I’m able to become acquainted with a world I never saw through the lenses of the people who made me who I am today. Some of them are professional photos, most are just snapped in the moment. There’s much to be seen in those thin plastic sleeves, and even more to learn about the people I call family.
Inspired by this practice, I incorporated this style of curation and documentation into my own life. I wanted to go beyond chronicling my life on the internet and start my own physical photo album collection that my grandchildren will one day have to comb through. My favor to them, though, is that they’re labeled and color coded. They better be grateful.
To date, I have two photo albums sitting on my bookshelf spanning from 2021 till now that chronicle the joy my friends and I have experienced in travel.
The first album begins with me and Ameerah’s trip to Mexico City in December 2021 and ends with my visit to Lucas in Helsinki in May 2022. It’s a burnt mustard color and has “Album de Photos - pour ma mémoire” on the cover. It holds 100 3×5in photos taken on disposable cameras from Walgreens.
The second album is a dark orange color and is nearly filled already with photos taken on a point and shoot camera I got off Craigslist. In it, you’ll find photos of my friends, really good food, rose bushes, sunsets, interesting architecture, and some really silly and special moments. As an even kinder gift to my descendants, I have written little captions on the white slips of paper that came with the album to give some brief insight on what they’re looking at and how I felt about it.
The next album? Who knows! I just pray that I’ll continue to have pleasant moments to fill it with.
What I do know is that this exercise of documentation has pushed me to be more intentional about living a life worth documenting. I strive to live a life so full of joy, connection, laughter, lessons, and love that in my latter years, my bookshelf will be brimming with albums. I pray to be able to send my grandchildren with very specific instructions to find an album, just as Betty sends me. And I pray they’ll be excited to hear the stories behind the photos, just as I am.
I want to have experiences in the present that I’ll want to talk about in 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Currently, these albums are exclusively filled with photos from trips, but perhaps one day I’ll just start snapping photos of everyday life. Perhaps the children will appreciate that, too.
Idk, mane. I’m just an ancestor in training, preserving my history as it happens. #LiaLovetheKids
