Our dear friend Bobby claims that I only write this blog in order to complain. To prove what nonsense that is, let me point out that it was a lovely day this afternoon and the cherry trees in the Castro are already starting to bloom.
I spent the afternoon organizing old printed photos, by which I mean I would pick pictures up out of one stack and put them in another and do absolutely nothing about them. I have a rough estimate that I probably have about 3, 000 photos. I never ever go back and look at them, but I decided I'm going to try and cull out the really dead wood and make some room in the closet that the boxes they live in are currently occupying.
I hired an organizer to come in on Wednesday and look through all these stacks and piles of so many much younger mrpeenees. My direction to the organizer is simple: pitch all the pictures that have no people in them.
My beloved R Man and my sainted mother shared one common trait, they were terrible photographers. Both demanded that the subject freeze and stand perfectly still while they tried to push the shutter button. Inevitably the result was a crooked blur that they swore was a picture. R Man dealt with his photography limitation by taking pictures of mostly landscapes because mountains don't move. Thus about easily a third of those 3,000 are just random mountains and forests and streets. When I look back at them, all I see are images that I already remember. So those 50, 60 shots of the hotel in Glacier Park in 1988? Out. Actual pictures of friends and relatives, many of whom have moved on to the other side of the grass, those I'll keep.
Here's a few that I've already run into and decided to put in the keep pile.
A tiny little mrpeenee, circa 1956, with my father, I think in Galveston. What strikes me most about this, aside from how absolutely adorable I was, is how very dark my father was. He had beautiful olive skin that never burned and would tan in the time it took him to cross a street. Did he pass that gene down to me? Hell no.










