When Amelia walked in the front door Thursday night, her eyes looked like she had seen a ghost. The big smile across her face indicated she might have just talked with a family member, alive and well, whom she long believed had died.

“Dad found it,” she said.

She was clutching a photo album she thought had been lost to time and bad fortune. I knew about this album by legend. Not to tell too much of my wife’s business, but she thought it was among the possessions she’d been forced to leave behind at the end of her first marriage.

Turns out, it had been hiding out in her father’s home office next door for 17 years or more, and he found it last week when he was moving some things around.

Amelia put this album together when she was in high school, and it includes baby pictures all the way through photos of her and her friends at school dances.

As Amelia and I looked through it, one of her lifelong friends, Elizabeth Williams, came by to deliver a cheerleading outfit for Pfeiffer (our third-grader wanted to wear that to school Friday instead of a jersey, and we didn’t have one). When Elizabeth heard about the album, in which she features prominently, she came inside to look through it herself.

Every photo had a story – some even Amelia had long forgotten and that I had never heard. As she and Elizabeth turned each page, they recalled the stories in vivid detail.

For both women, it was therapeutic – transporting them back to a time before they had bills to pay or had to go to work the next day. For the children and me, it was a way to connect with Amelia that we thought we’d never get.

Then, somberly, I thought, “We don’t take enough pictures of our children. If they wanted to make one of these albums for themselves one day, I don’t know if they could.”

We have plenty of baby pictures of all three girls. After that, it gets sparse. We don’t really think about capturing daily life for posterity. When we’re on a trip or at a special event, we’ll snap a few – maybe – but when we pit, “Stop what you’re doing and smile,” against, “Which is more important: Having the experience or taking a photo of it?” the latter almost always wins.

In the digital, social media-driven age, the mainstream connotation of photos has changed so much from when I was young. In many cases, they’ve become the means by which people brand themselves to others for approval (see, the like button), instead of a way to keep cherished memories for themselves. Partly to avoid this pervasive trap, we’ve called our lack of deliberate photo-taking “good parenting.”

Here’s the rub: Julia is a junior and Zayley a freshman in high school. Pfeiffer will be 9 on her next birthday – the halfway point to supposed adulthood. The relentless march of time is still … relentless.

Yes, we have wonderful memories with our children that we all appreciate and often recount. We’ve been places and done things. We’ve tried to make the most of being together even amid the daily grind. But there is so much power in a photo. I saw that power beyond any doubt with Amelia and Elizabeth on Thursday.

Plus, what about my children’s future spouses and their children? They shouldn’t be denied making connections as strong as possible with their loved one’s past.

So, while we’re still not going to become “those” people – the ones who can’t enjoy anything because they are too busy taking photos for Facebook or Instagram – we will start making an effort to capture more of our lives for our own records.

Because, as I have now been humbly reminded, it matters.

Zack Plair is managing editor of The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Our View: Why The Dispatch is embracing philanthropy to amplify local news

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 2 days ago

• 

  Roses and Thorns: 7-11-26

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 2 days ago