The Images of Our Lives

Our kids bought me a scanner for my 60th birthday. This was some months ago and it took some time to get it ordered and delivered and for me to find some time to get it put together. It is a Canon CanoScan 8800F and it has an adapter for scanning slides. It does occur to me that talking about slides and slide projectors may not be particularly informative for many who read my posts, but this disconnect is kind of the point. I have these old pictures in a format I can no longer display and I wanted to do something to save them.

I started to look at some pictures (slides) we saved from my parents’ house shortly before it was torn down. Some of the slides are likely older than I am and even pictures in which I appear are really at the earliest reaches of my powers of recollection. It is impossible to know if I really remember or if I remember the descriptions provided by others.

Here is a picture I am guessing was taken approximately 55 years ago. I am on the right with the binoculars and my brother Dan is on the left. We are not twins, but my mother must have thought it interesting to dress us alike. Perhaps it was a way to keep us from fighting about who had the coolest stuff. The kid in the middle is Lowell Monke our neighbor from down the gravel road. At least I think this is the case. I must admit I even have difficulty differentiating the pictures of me from my brother after this length of time. Actually, maybe it is my brother Bill, but that would make this story less interesting. I wrote about Lowell in a blog post some years ago because we both went on to academic careers that had something to do with classroom technology. I wrote a book about the integration of technology and he wrote a book cautioning educators against instructional dependence on technology with younger children. I have not had the opportunity to talk with him in years and I have no idea how different our perspectives really are. What are the odds?

I am intrigued by the current interest in stories, storytelling, and the importance of collecting the stories of our lives. Images may be a neglected part of these stories. Maybe now is the time to consider how we will save the images we tucked away in our closets and basements.