I have been scanning pictures. It’s been on my to do list
for years. I have boxes of photo albums languishing in the garage, gazing at me
forlornly every time I park the car, wanting attention, wanting to be
immortalized in the ethereal spaces of the magic box – the computer.
The impetus that prompted me to begin the horrendous process
of scanning hundreds – no thousands of pictures – has been to find old
snapshots to illustrate my memoir. I have no other pressing tasks to do with
the book. The dozens of agent queries I sent out are dead in the water. I have
no desire to even look at the manuscript, let alone initiate any more editing.
First, I bought a disc player attachment for my MacBook Pro
and downloaded the old childhood family photos that my brother had
painstakingly scanned and gifted in CD form to all the family members. That was
laborious. It took forever. The disc player kept stalling. Oh, I don’t even
want to recall that pain – but I did it.
Next I decided to scan a pristine picture album: my own
photo collection from when I first came to Seattle as a teenager in 1966. I
began with loading one snapshot at a time onto my geriatric printer/scanner.
Each scan took over two minutes – an initial “preview,” and then the actual
scan. And then I found an option to scan several photos at a time, and the dear
machine actually identifies them as separate photos. Eureka! I became more
efficient, pulling the next batch of photos out of the albums as the last ones
were loading. Ouch! Hard on the cuticles as my thumbs got shoved into the edges
of the plastic slip covers over and over. But I made progress.
Oh no! The scanner jammed. Damn! Unplug the scanner, boot up
and hope it works. It does! It chugs along and captures another dozen or so
photos. I baby the scanner, petting it and cooing sweet nothings: “You can do
it babe. You got this sweetheart!”
As I crop and rotate the pictures in the iPhoto app, lo and
behold, I discover the info function! I can edit the time – change it from the
current day to that sweet day long ago – and it tells me exactly how many
years, days, minutes – and, for crying out loud, seconds – ago that photo was
taken. Forty-five years, three days, sixteen hours, five minutes and forty-two
seconds? Really? Woo hoo! And not only can I load the date, but I can enter exactly
where the shot was taken – it locates using GPS. So I can tell the computer
that this photo was taken at the Seattle Community College campus – or St John,
Virgin Islands – or even the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee – no kidding!
I have now scanned three albums – up until the time my son
was born thirty-six years ago. You can imagine how many albums I have yet to
work on. Zot!
“Make sure you have backup,” my daughter says as I happily
and proudly tell her what I have achieved. She knows of what she speaks for she
lost thousands of photos when her computer crashed three years ago. No problem,
I say. I have backup.
However, my backup hard drive is testy. Sometimes when I
plug it in to the USB port, it doesn’t read as being plugged in. Good grief! I
play cha cha cha, in and out with the plug. I wait a while and try plugging it
in again. Ah – I get it to back up – finally – and just to make sure, I open
the hard drive and look for my photos. Where the heck are they? Nowhere to be
found! I open every part of the hard drive time machine. Nooooo!
I have an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar this
afternoon.
St John, Virgin Islands, December 1972
