All Gone

Not long ago I mentioned buying a 1TB external drive to back up the computer which my daughter needed to her school.  We got that backed up.   It used less than fifteen percent of the space on this drive.  Some people have old cars up on blocks in the back yard.  I have old an old Mac on my shelf that has a ton of photos and music that are not properly backed up.  Some day it won’t start up any more.  This MacBook Pro I’m working on hasn’t been backed up in half a year either.   And though my daughter isn’t happy about it, I tell her data to move over make way for mine.  (I’m quite aware that it all should be backed up in the cloud and that this would be cheaper and easier and real time and I thank you for those reminders.)

Regular readers might recall that my computer hasn’t had a functioning screen for two month’s now.  To see anything, I have it hooked up to a separate screen that is much larger and feels large, staring at me now as I look at it and type, while my fingers move about somewhere else.  Seeing everything so large I adjusted the screen saver so photos would rotate in and out.  Coming in at television scale, they are striking and given that I now had all my photos on one drive I could set up something I've long wanted to do: put it all together so that the last fifteen years that digital photography came and went all day before my eyes.    

Getting eighty-thousand photos on to my machine wasn’t difficult.  But getting the iPhoto software to process them all proved especially time consuming.  My old workhorse frequently hung and had to be restarted.  There was the ever pressing fear that a six-hour process would be killed in the fifth hour by an unsuspecting family member who hopped into the drivers seat here.  (Thank you, once again, well noted.  I should update my OS.  This would invariably make it all faster and easier.)

Crude though my preparations may have been, I met with success.  I now have a decade and a half of photos that float in and out and television scale into my view when the computer goes idle.  I have, of course, brought everyone else in to stare at it with me.  I generally sit and watch for a few when I return from the bathroom.  There it all is, the life you’ve captured, all gone. 

I wrote this a moment ago in an email to a dear friend with whom I was discussing old photos of New York from the 1970’s:  I'm up posting a few blogs and selfishly, perhaps, I know that through volume and regularity, I have captured a particular version of what I see in photos, as well, and assume that though most are random and middling for now, they may one day narrate something that aches because its gone.