Memorabilia

Subject: Memorabilia 

As the clatter of life recedes and time hangs heavy it's time to look into the drawers and boxes full of memorabilia, full of a life spent. Things which somehow stuck like glue to your accumulation of things, a lifetime of things which fairly speak of you having lived.

The open reel audio tapes with the sound of voices, long dead, echoing moments long gone are kept as if their redundancy would make me also redundant. The video tapes now transformed, initially onto disc now settled into their new home 'in the cloud', like some sort of digital memorial where we will all lay in the future, bits and bytes to be regaled by future generations for being so odd.
The letters still in their original envelopes stamp marked and dated much like the emotions they enclose, a litany of what ifs, of yearnings to be close, of unrequited love.
How unabashed we were, striding the fields even as they were being written unknowing of the crash as our emotions were trampled on in such a cursory manner. Dear John.
They litter the years as if beacons shining their light on the reality of letting go and striving to regain a semblance of ones former self. The emotional baggage which they unfurl was so powerful then, where is that power now. Where is the fine tuning which used to flow from the accompaniment of a certain who, a plethora of who's or maybe only one or two. Those moments of bliss and craven unhappiness are the price we pay for saying we have been here or as Wilde wrote "to have loved and lost is better than to never have loved at all".
Letters from Mum and Dad, 'letters' when all they wanted was the parental contentment of knowing I was sleeping in the next room. Heart felt love of a mother who's only son was far away in places she could not imagine. Her fear for my safety was magnified a hundred times from the tension of a late night out, the sound of a key in the lock meant she could drift off into sleep after those hours of watchful waiting, to one of unimaginable wondering 'where was he and is he safe'.
Dad's letters were naturally of a more resolved nature as he accepted the impulsive nature of his wandering son and was happy to hitch a ride and see, in his own minds eye the sights and sounds the letters and the audio tapes brought, courtesy of the postman. These collections of memorabilia are poignant if we allow our self to sit beside the writer for a second or two, as they wrote what they thought appropriate. Mums emotion, Dads sagacity shine through and remind me, if I need reminding of the people they were and the importance of the rock they were and their sustained love (unlike the girlfriends) through thick and thin.
Like is a moving tapestry and like the images of a tapestry the bits and pieces in the drawer are a vivid reminder of a time gone by. I've done a fair amount of collecting those moments myself, with my own family. Videos of a time when we, the parent were keen to show them, the children the bright lights of Disney, or the backwaters of our own childhood. Captured on film, transferred into the ether of Google Cloud, theirs will be, all the nostalgia they can handle.  But of course the energy and the drive to capture the moment is largely in the eyes of the director and behind the lens, as I found when trying to stoke up the enthusiasm of the actors in our little melodramas. Perhaps it's in the genes, this urge to record and interpret. Perhaps most people happily take everything for granted but just in case I'm wrong, I'm writing a blog to tell you all about it.