Scrapbooks, Unfinished

My recent posts have a retro component. The reason? As we clear out my parents’ house, we find boxes of papers, photos, letters from the last century and a quarter. Little by little, we sort through, so I live in someone else’s past a lot lately. Today I went through a box of what apparently was going to be a 1994 travel scrapbook. Or maybe my parents compiled the scrapbook, and these scraps were left over, I don’t know. The latter is more likely. But the trip was a France tour, so this box held extra interest for me.

High points of Paris, Normandy, and Brittany traced on a pink photocopied map, the 1994 tour guide’s instructions, my parents’ tour badges and Paris Visite passes, some unwritten picture postcards, and lots of bilingual brochures. Since my dad was the one conceiving this scrapbook in his head during the tour, I found two of every brochure. I’m not sure I can explain his logic (He thought he was Noah?), but given that in general my dad liked to save and my mom likes to pitch, I am pretty sure collecting doubles was my dad’s doing. Another clue is the page headings printed on his dot-matrix printer. Another clue is the huge number of newspaper clippings on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Mom and Dad’s tour, which included D-Day beaches and museums, was about a month before this anniversary. Both my parents served in World War II, but Dad had a special interest in D-Day.

This project produced a couple of Notes-to-Self :

• Finish my own scrapbooks. My dad probably did finish memorializing this 1994 trip and I’m now just seeing stuff that didn’t make it into the scrapbook. But I have unfinished scrapbook ideas and materials that I feel sad I did not put together.
• Decide on a statute of limitations on travel scrapbooks. If a trip is ??? years ago, and I still haven’t done the book, let it go.
• Do the book. Pitch the leftovers.
• I may have inherited my father’s “presentation gene.” When I approach a farmers’ market display of roses, my mind automatically frames a photo. As I stroll through a museum, my mind classifies lessons and reactions into themes to better explain it to someone. I usually pick up a brochure (just one) to help me remember later. I feel giddy to find some goofy visual like rabbit stickers or a die-cut Renault to put in my scrapbook. I like the idea of presenting my trip in an organized and creative way to show, but especially to treasure the memories.

I wonder sometimes if my father honed his “presentation” skill during the decades when his antennae were tuned for story problems to present in the eleven mathematics textbooks he wrote. I can just imagine him screeching to a halt at a random construction site to note how he could use the angles of a gabled roof in a geometry illustration. 

Me, I have no excuse. I must have inherited this tendency to present a story, as well as to keep stuff attached to happy memories.