Obviously, I am failing at this umpteenth attempt to keep a journal of sorts online. It's exactly in keeping with other activities in my life which are somehow tied to memory/keepsaking: taking photographs, saving letters and e-mails, boxing up paraphenalia related to 'Very Important Events' (Houdini's footprint certificate and hospital bracelet are sitting on top of the dining room buffet, gathering dust, for example).
Thank god for digital cameras, because Houdini would not have had a record of his life (and from now on) otherwise, I suspect. We are infamous for rarely taking pictures and then never getting them developed. To be honest, we're just as bad with the digital camera--we take pictures and movies but take forever to download them from the flash cards to a disk or CD or DVD or what have you. Were it not for family members clamoring for more pictures (and in the case of my parents, every single picture burned to DVD so folk back home can see Houdini in ever minute detail of his glory), I suspect we'd have stopped taking pictures of Houdini somewhere around month three, when we'd exhausted every single flash card we own (because, yes, we'd be even too lazy to buy or order new ones).
What's sort of funny is that I love old photos of my family (and, of course, myself) and I've tried, over the years, to become the possessor of all photos and relics related to my family, previously owned by my parents or my grandparents. And lest it be thought that I am solely focused on me and my own, I try to do the same for Lemel, although there I am faced with stiff competition in the shape of his sister, Velel, who is, frankly, anally fanatical about family relics and photos.
My parents left for home yesterday and I am trying hard not to think about it, and not just for the selfish reason that they aren't here for the next couple of months to help out. I am trying very hard not to think about my grandmother, whose memories are all but erased now. I am trying hard to hold on to my last memories of her, when I saw her 11 years ago, not spectacularly healthy, but still much healthier than now and definitely the alert, funny, loving woman she's always been in my life. I am, in a way, happy to remember her this way, and to have no tangible proof of her having grown older and sicker beyond that.
Sometimes it's good not to have certain memories.
