Photographs

     A couple nights ago Tommy, Theresa, Randy and Anusha were hanging out after Sunday supper,

(her majesty, our kitty Lucy, also decided to join the gathering. Can you find her?),

    ...when Anusha asked if she could see our photos from our Hawaii trip (see posts from 4/1/2015 -  4/14/2015).
    I said, "Sure," let me go find them, I think they're in the dining room cabinet."
    "Oh, you printed them?"  she asked.
    "Well, yeah," replied I.
    "What you're gonna put 'em in an album, or something?"  asked Randy.
    "Yeah, soon as I get around to it,"  I said.
    The youngsters then proceeded to reminisce about how much they liked flipping through the old photo albums at their parents' and grandparents' house when they were younger.
    "Well," I offered, "if you wanted to you all could start printing your photos and putting them in albums."
    "Doesn't that take, like, a day to get them printed?"  asked someone.
    "Or two weeks?" asked Theresa, remembering how her dad used to send our photos in the mail to be developed.
    "Then when you got them back sometimes they weren't all that great,"  recalled someone else.
    "No, it takes minutes to get your photos developed at Walgreen's or CVS,"  I corrected them.  "And you can stick your camera's memory card into the store computer and choose  which photos you'd like developed so you're not stuck with any bad ones. And it is nice to be able to be able to look at prints and pass them around."
    Except, of course, when you can't remember where you put your prints.
      I scoured every shelf in the house

  and managed to round up about a dozen envelopes containing several  years' worth of not-yet-organized prints of trips, events, and important occasions,

    ...but not the envelope of our Hawaii photos.
    "Well, that's all right, "  said Anusha graciously,  "I'll just check out your blog."
    And the moment for sitting together in  the family room and passing around photographs had passed, just as the sight of my random jumble of envelopes of photos from who knows where or when had dampened the spark of interest in the youngsters for prints that would eventually have to be somehow organized and stored.
 

    But then a littler later that night by coincidence Theresa was going through the drawers of an old bedroom dresser full of odds and ends,

...when she found several bags full of old photographs given to me by my mother years ago.

    We had the best time going through them, with me trying to recall who all the people were and where all the places might have been.

    "Wow, this is really a lost art, isn't it?"  said Theresa, referring to us sifting through old forgotten photographs.
    "Well," said I,  "I guess your generation will always have all your photos electronically stored, dated and organized on your devices."
    "But these old pictures are so fun,"  she sighed.
    "They are,"  I agreed. "Until you have to figure out what to do with them."

    Epilogue:
    I spent much of the next morning wracking my brain trying to remember where I could have put our Hawaii pictures.   Later in the day at a moment when I'd forgotten about the pictures and  was preoccupied with some completely different subject the light bulb flashed on in my mind:  I remembered where the Hawaii prints were:
   I'd already put them in a album.