Rocks of Ages

It seems my wife has turned an old adage on its head: “One rock is worth 1000 pictures.” Let me explain.

I’m involved in what may be the life-long, or possibly life-ending, process of sorting through 60 years of photos. Some are already digital, in numerous files on our computers. Some are digital on CDs. Many are color sides. And some are prints. I’ve set about collecting and sorting them by subject, digitizing those that aren’t, culling them, re-sizing them and optimizing them

The idea is to get rid of all those boxes of slides, pictures and CDs, and to concentrate our entire photographic history onto one well-organized hard drive. Then, in our really old age, we’ll be able to sit in front of a big screen TV and reminisce about our many adventures…and be depressed that we can’t any longer have adventures.

It’s enormously tedious and time consuming, although I have to admit some pleasure in being able to look at images I haven’t seen in decades. But a big problem comes in sequencing. My memories of things in the past are often inaccurate. I’ve noticed lately that I get caught conflating events and dates and, often, embellishing them. My wife, on the other hand, can remember the 12-digit library card number that she had when she was 15. (There I go, embellishing again.) But it is true, her memory for the past, even the distant past is uncanny.

So today, I was going through a couple of hundred images of a trip we took in 2003, from San Francisco up the California coast to the Oregon border, back down through the Mt. Shasta area and Sacramento. I had the photos arranged in folders, depicting the areas we visited, but was a bit unsure if we’d visited Napa on the way up or the way down.

We had shots of the Marin highlands and Pt. Reyes lighthouse, which is south of Bodega Bay. My recollection was that we went to Napa first and then crossed back to the coast at Bodega Bay. But looking at the map, that didn’t make sense. You’d think, guy that I am and not ever wanting to backtrack, we’d have hit Napa after Sacramento, on the way south. When I asked Mary Lou, she agreed with my recollection, but headed to the kitchen to confirm.

Now you have to realize that she’s a bit of a Shinto-ist. That is, I think she must believe that there is some sort of spirituality in inanimate objects. In her case it’s rocks, or, rather, stones. Whenever we come back from anywhere, even abroad, there is always a collection of stones of various sizes in her bag. What must customs think? She then takes a Sharpie and writes a place and a date on them. What must the kami of that stone think about getting tattooed?

In the kitchen, she sorted through a few of her collection and pulled out one that said “8/6/03 – Drakes Beach, Pt Reyes Nat’l Seashore.” That was enough to settle the question and to allow me to put those pictures in the sequence demanded by my own OCD,.

Oddly, in my readings into the mysteries of cosmology and quantum physics, I recently came across some theorizing that perhaps, since everything is constituted of the same sub-atomic particles, that unseeable reality may just be the true reality. Perhaps Mary Lou’s rocks really are really reaching out to her.