Memories, pressed between the pages in my mind...memories, sweetened through the ages just like wine...

- Elvis Presley

My mom sent me a monster box stuffed with old photos and my high school yearbooks at the end of last week, and I've been burrowing through all of it over the past couple days. Soon I will triumph over my laziness and hook up our scanner so's I can chronicle my childhood year-by-year photographically as well. Yes, I will nearly DOUBLE my self-indulgence!

I love going through old pictures and the like, even if they aren't mine. When I was young, I used to go through my parents' baby pictures and marvel. I guess it's that one moment in time snapped, captured forever: the scene, the mood, that very second where nothing will ever change for eternity. I sometimes used to imagine what it would be like after my death, people unearthing my baby pictures, wondering who I was, what I grew up being, why I was dressed like an utter nerd most of the time.

And my yearbook signatures are another wonder. So many tributes scribbled in looping bubble writing that I can't decipher the meaning of. What the hell did Jen Nelson mean when she wrote in my senior yearbook, "I'll never forget; 'We're dead!'" Hm. *I* seem to have forgotten. Hopefully she still hasn't.

I think that would be my personal hell: Losing my memories. You could (but please don't) lay me in a bed incapacitated for the rest of my life, but to lose the very substance that makes me who I am...just kick the plug out of the wall, please.

I'll get back to year-by-year journaling as soon as I scan some of the correlating pictures to wow and amaze.