I always hoped as I grew older I would acquire wisdom.
Unfortunately, instead of wisdom what I've actually acquired is a huge collection of family photos.
Here's what happens to people. We have children and we take countless videos and photos. Next we have grandchildren and we take even more photos of them.
Finally, we all hope to maybe inherit a little something from our senior relatives. And we do.
We get all their photos.
When my wife and I were young parents and we took all these videos and photos we looked forward to the day ? many years in the future ? when we would sit back, relax and enjoy them, reliving those wonderful moments all over again.
The other day we put on some 25-year-old family videos that my wonderful sister-in-law has converted to DVD.
Wife: "Okay, we've been watching this child on a swing for the last 30 minutes. How long does it go on like this?"
Me: "I think for two hours. I remember I stopped taping when the fire department arrived."
Wife: "Fire department?"
Me: "You were gone and I was cooking. I was so busy taping I forget about stuff on the stove and ?You know, this isn't going to be a relaxing tape. Let's try another one. How about three hours of kids in the sandbox. Or, we could watch their baseball and softball games, 1981-1993."
Wife: "Highlights?"
Me: "No, the whole games."
We all take too many photos. We turn our camcorders on and we never turn them off. My wife and I thought after our children grew and left home we'd be able to downsize. In fact, we need a bigger house to store all the family photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations.
We have more photos of Mickey Mouse than the Walt Disney Company.
Wife: "We aren't going to live long enough to watch all this and go through all the albums. We need to sort through them and just keep the best."
Me: "We can't get rid of family photos. Family photos are sacred, like baseball cards, letter jackets and the collection of stuff that's crammed into my top dresser drawer."
Maybe those are bad examples.
But she's right. I knew what I had to do. So I gathered all the photos we really didn't need and put them into boxes.
And I mailed them to our kids.
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