Never Too Late to Date Photos

December 7, 2003

The Boston Herald

You think you’ll remember but you won’t. You’re certain you will always know the exact year you waited in line to have your daughter’s picture taken with Santa, have her finally seated on his lap only to have her take one long look at him and burst into tears. Of course you’ll remember. The moment is unforgettable.          

But as the years go by and one Christmas follows another, details fade. And pretty soon it happens. You look at a picture you had memorized and you think, when was this taken? Was my daughter three or four? And as hard as you try, you cannot remember.      

Date the pictures, people told you back then. And you said okay, sure. But you didn’t. You didn’t need to. You knew you would never forget the important events of your life. Just the way you knew you would never forget how old your son was when he got his first tooth. Or how old you were when you rode no hands for the first time.      

Now there are boxes of photographs, thousands of pictures, all without dates. And even worse the photos have no names. And you need names, because after a while it’s impossible to tell which baby is smiling on a blanket in the back yard on a sunny day and which aunt is sitting on the living room couch next to which child.  

That’s when you rely on clothes and wallpaper for context clues. Whose pink dress was that? And did we have orange wallpaper when the youngest was born? And look, this must have been her eighth birthday because there are nine candles on the cake.

My father has always dated his pictures.  So I can look even now and know that it was August 1953 when we spent a week at Buzzard’s Bay. And October 1957 that we drove to Washington DC and I took a picture of a squirrel while my father muttered, “All these monuments. All this history.  And you’re taking a picture of a squirrel?”

“Adventureland – August 19, 1957” he wrote on a slide.  Not Disney’s Adventureland, mind you, New Hampshire’s. “Sept 4, 1958 – Dot, Bev, Mike Ryan. – The first day of school – 7th grade,” he wrote on a slide in tiny print. “Bev – Christmas 1961,” he wrote in longhand on the back of a color photo.

My father has only one daughter so he doesn’t have to write my name on family pictures. It is not as if he would confuse me with anyone else. But this is what he does.

I met a girl once at the Neponset Drive-in on the swings. There used to be swings and a slide and a whole playground under the giant open-air screen and kids would play there until it got dark and the movie began.

I can’t remember the girl’s name now though I did for years. But it’s gone, though we were friends and she slept over my house a few times and told me she was going to be a Carmelite nun, which surprised me because Carmelite nuns take a vow of silence and this girl talked a lot.

My father took a picture of us under a trellis and he labeled the picture and dated it, too. But the picture is lost. I haven’t see it in years, though I can still see the girl,  shorter than I was, with dark straight hair and her hand on her hip, not a nun like pose at all.

Images remain but names float away. And dates. And places, too. They’re here and then they’re gone, like the words of a favorite song you memorized.

Christmas last year. Do you remember it? And Christmas the year before? I have pictures of so many Christmases but not one is dated. So we sit and try to figure out the whens and wheres by the color of the walls and the tables and lamps in the background.

There’s Lauren with my mother at Grandma’s house. I recognize the chair. Maybe Lauren is five. Maybe she is six. There’s Julie and her friend, Carla, with Santa. How old were they then? And who was this Santa? There’s Jeannie’s kids but just three of them, Shiloh and Ewen not born yet. And there’s Scott coming in the front door but was this last year or the year before?

Christmases blend. Years fade. And names and dates and details disappear.      

This year I am going to date my photographs and put them in a book instead of in a box. And I am going to write who is in the picture in magic marker beside each one even if I’m certain I will never forget anyone.   

Because I may. And because it is never too late to do what you should have done from the start.