You know that famous quote that writers all over the timeline of creation and publication have said that goes if you can only survive childhood, you'll have enough to write about for the rest of your life?  For awhile I didn't think it was all that true.  Most of the things that I write concern adults.  I've spent the past thirteen years as a writer trying to mask my age, trying to write to appeal to adults.  I bust my ass to hide exactly how old I am so that I can write better adult contemporary fiction novels.  I think, if you'll allow me a moment to pat myself on the back or metaphorically congratulate my fingers at the keys, this is a noble aspiration.  

That being said, I would like to give my research skills--honed over years of delving into adult-associated issues--a rest and come back to my roots.

Or, rather, my pictures.

My mother used to take an exorbitant amount of pictures when I was growing up.  I distinctly recall, for roughly the first ten years of my life, a hefty Nikon secured around my mom's neck, a thick, black stitched bag of film canisters on her shoulder. They don't even make those anymore.  When I tell people this, or even think about it, it occurs to me how prehistoric it all sounds.  A Nikon.  Film.  A mom taking real pictures of her children: pictures that don't involve a smartphone.  What is this?  Clan of the Cave Bear?  Honestly, when in this story does everyone grab a club and fight the mammoth?  But pictures were everything to my mom.  There was never a moment of those first ten years of my life, and the ten before I came along when she was only a parent to one or two children, where she wasn't ready to snap a picture.  On the weekends, we'd take them down to Longs Drug Stores--if you're under the age of about seventeen, you probably don't know what these are, thanks to CVS buying them out--and have them developed.  Again, if you're under the age of about seventeen and reading this, the last word in the previous sentence is most likely foreign to you so I'll break it down for you.  We'd take these little rolls of film to a store and hand them over to the employees who would tell you to come back in a week to pick them up.  After the allotted time was finished, we'd come back down to Longs--usually with more film to start the process over again and keep up our weekly visits to the pharmacy--and the employees behind the counter would hand us a paper envelope that would inevitable rip if you fumbled it the slightest between the store and the car.  Inside, it was stuffed full of 5x7 pictures and what looked like an orange and horribly distorted film reel of tiny copies of all the pictures developed in that set.  

In short, this is what your smartphones do in seconds, milliseconds.  But without the shitty envelope, the orange film strips, the possibility of red-eyes, and of course the never-failing hospitality of minimum-wage-earning employees.

My mother would take these photos home and do one of two things with them: frame them in wooden collage frames that resided proudly throughout our house or she'd sit down at the kitchen table and, one at a time, paste them all into photo albums with individual picture corners she'd stick on blank pages.  It was a tedious process, really far too time consuming for most people to even comprehend.  But to her, these pictures were everything.  Ever single one deserved four corners, straight framing on her part, a date of when the photo was taken, and sometimes a handwritten caption.

The photo albums, documenting her children's early lives in pictures, took up entire book cases in our homes.  They were the biggest pain in the ass to move--something we did a lot--but they were never, ever left behind.  It wasn't an option.  

I was quite proud of these photo albums my mom created in her all to sparse free time.  I used to show them to friends on their first visit to my house; it was a vital part of the grand tour.  When I'd get bored, I'd flip through them sometimes.  I'd lug them one at a time onto my lap and sit for hours, looking at times I remembered, and times that I didn't.  

I'd like to take a chance to do that.  I'd like to look through the photo albums of my childhood, even the ones that came after my mom stopped taking pictures.  Because I still remember the times just fine, even after she retired the Nikon and the film died.