Baby Pictures

I just hired a “pixologist.” What’s that? Someone who specializes in organizing and preserving photographs and papers. I have a lot of those. I have them of myself – and my siblings, and my mother when she was a baby… and more. Maybe because I was also the “baby” of the family, there seem to be a lot of me.

So… what to do with them?

Ok, I know when you birth a child, you want to document it. I understand. But the child grows up. The parents get older. The child gets older. The parent may now be a grandparent – let’s say, in the second half of life. Your parents die. Your siblings die. Next up??

Now who wants pictures of yourself or your siblings as babies? Does your child? Possibly not. And those who don’t have children? Doubtful. Your cousins? Unlikely. Your friends? I’m sure not. (Forget about your friends’ children.)

I’m only recently beginning to really understand the flavor of my own mortality. I’ve understood it for previous generations, of course – or so I’d thought, anyway… having lost my father when I was seventeen, and my mother at twenty-four. But now the whole picture is changing. It’s as if some “frame” is moving up on the screen of my life. And with it, I move up, too. Same for my siblings. My friends. My era.

There can’t be room in this world for everyone’s baby pictures, can there? I don’t think so. I remember the old rationality for the existence of death: “If we didn’t die, what would the world do with ALL THE PEOPLE?” Meaning the bodies. Think of all the issues!?

Same with baby pictures.

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. The “frame” will eventually move up and off the screen, no matter what. And as it does, baby pictures may take care of themselves. Let’s just place them elsewhere… It feels somehow unseemly to burn or shred them… or give them to Good Will. Why would anyone ELSE want them?

Anyway… back to the point. Yes. I think baby pictures will take care of themselves. That’s my gift to myself today. I’ll prop them in a corner or lay them in a drawer and accept that the next generation will toss them. And why not? No one will know who they’re photos of! (I have boxes full of photos like that.) And no one will care. They’ll have their own photos to figure out – either virtual or physical – for posterity. Doesn’t matter, in the end. Dust to dust, as we all know. Piles and files of baby photographs (even online in “Forever” accounts) will eventually disperse. They’ll disappear, or be deleted. Forgotten. And that’s OK.

Despite the efforts of pixologists.

From left to right: Julilly Waller Kohler, Eddie Knauf, Ruth DeYoung Kohler, Gillian Brewster Kohler

Me as a baby

My mother, Julia Lilly House