Memories

I don’t have kids but I do have a niece I like hanging out with. She’s seven now and I realized that she virtually never shows up anywhere on my social media. I tend to not post a lot of pictures of people online and that goes more so for kids. I don’t have any strong feelings about this one way or another, it’s just my way of doing it. It means my Facebook and Instagram pages are largely devoid of the people in my life.

This is fine, but it does mean that when I get those ‘memory’ posts it’s often of things I saw and did but not of the people I was with. If I want to see that I have to go into my personal photo roll and check out where I was on a particular day. Google Photos backs up everything on my phone and gives me memories privately, so that tends to be more meaningful than anything I put out in public.

Of course, in the old days people had to actually print photos out, put them in a book, and then look through that book if they wanted to see pictures of the past. They didn’t get daily notifications about what they were doing one, five, ten years ago.

The other day this popped up in my memories feed.

It’s a photo I took of Zadie Smith’s NW when I was reading it a couple years ago. I love this passage and I’d forgotten about it until I got a little notification in my phone. It made me think maybe I should take photos of words I love more often. I can file them away in a notebook but, like those photo albums, I won’t see them unless I take them off the shelf. This way past thoughts and ideas are with me, ready to pop up a year, two years, four years from now.

Anyways, back to my niece, I’ve decided I’d like to do a better idea of recording stories about her. This week she instructed me on how to construct a sword out of Legos. Then we built a tower out of blocks for the Snowman King and had to stand guard to protect from dogs and other people in the house who might come. Also, I’m told she now prefers Lego to My Little Pony and that her younger sister would likely ruin any weddings she attends.

Oh, and my wife wasn’t allowed to look at these slippers because she “likes animals” so might steal them.