Choosing

I spent yesterday sifting through my cache of digital photos. Being a Maccie, I use iPhoto to store, amend, and share my photos. But I have so many of them, thanks to the fact that I take multiple snaps of something that catches my eye, and to make matters worse, I save all of them knowing there are differences in each one, barely imperceptible as they may be.

Storing all these photos, my laptop began to show signs of stress, groaning and complaining with each task . So last year I decided to relocate all my photos onto my external hard drive, sorting them in folders by subject matter, and burning each folder to cd as a backup copy, knowing I can always move them back over to iPhoto on my laptop if needbe.

It was a fine idea with one huge problem in implementation: somewhere in the transition, certain photos got lost. Some of my favorite photos, in fact. They are simply gone - not in my laptop and not in the external hard drive. The only thing I can figure is that they snagged on something while traveling through the cable from the laptop to the external drive, and how I’ll find them there is beyond me. Feeling sick over the whole thing, I just decided to avoid dealing with it for months . . . until yesterday. There was a photo I just love - I used it as my header photo when I first started my blog, but then I switched templates with the blog and yesterday morning when I found how to substitute my own photo, I dedicated the day to organizing photos.

It’s a tedious job. First I have to open each photo, name it, then decide which folder to put it in. Sometimes photos belong in more than one folder, and as I copy and paste them in multiple bins, I worry that I’m going to fill up my external hard drive, knowing all the while that I can simply buy another one if and when that becomes the case.

But the hands-down hardest thing of all is throwing away photos. The trashcan on my computer is burgeoning, but I refuse to empty it (which is a good thing because this morning while I walking, I thought of a picture I want to use - one of the blurry ones I should’ve tossed long ago.)

Though I often feel old enough to argue the point, I am not, technically, a child of the depression. When my mother and her siblings cleaned out the house after Granddaddy and Grandmother died, they all had a good, long laugh about the things they found: yellowish-brown string wrapped around pieces of cardboard ripped from the back of tablets and enough folded scrap pieces of aluminum foil to take care of leftovers from covered dish dinners at every church in the southeast United States for sixteen years at least. There were hundreds - maybe thousands - of bottle caps, but then, to be fair, Granddaddy used bottlecaps as checkers: turning some with the writing showing for red checkers, turning others face down for the black ones. Or vice versa. But a checkerboard only needs a certain, small number of checkers (or in this case, bottlecaps), leaving one to wonder why Granddaddy held on to the rest of the caps. He didn’t make jewelry or purses or belts with them, and their kitchen - in fact their entire house - wasn’t so large that it could be considered a hardship to walk to the trashcan. And good as he was, Granddaddy could only play one game of checkers at a time, so I just don’t know about all the hundreds or thousands of others.

My Aunt Irene who died last year at the admirable age of 97.5 years was queen of living beneath her means. She and her sisters drove their cars till antique dealers asked to buy them. She lived in the same house from the 1940s until she moved into an assisted living facility. And when a bar of soap reached what anybody else would consider the end of its lifespan and time to open another bar, Aunt Irene tossed the soap sliver in a pie tin with other soap slivers, put the tin on top of her heater, and let them melt into a new, bigger, usable bar of soap.

When she moved into the assisted living facility, Aunt Irene began collecting napkins and boxes. We would take her out to eat, and she’d fill her pocketbook with napkins because “you always need napkins”. Mother and I would go visit, and Mother would distract Irene while I got rid of the boxes that had accumulated in the past 2 days. Aunt Rene could spy an empty cardboard box at 20 paces, and she would always take it and tuck it in her room because “you just never know when you might need a good, sturdy box.”

Yes, Aunt Rene loved her boxes.

Which could be where I inherited my love of containers.

Especially pocketbooks.

I still have the cute little plaid number with the burlap lining: pretty on the outside, coarse on the inside. I still have the blue John Romaine pocketbook I carried in high school and the leather shoulder-strap number I carried during my undergraduate days in the 70s.

When I became a mother, my purses grew in size to the point where a family of five could live comfortably for two-and-a-half weeks off the contents of my pocketbook. No rigid sides anymore, just canvas because it was sturdy and flexible, allowing me to cram more inside the purse. Lots of small pockets inside and out to make it easier to reach and grab without looking.

Now, though, my focus is downsizing. Just this morning when it was time to take Phoebe (our dog) to the spa, I grabbed my driver’s license, my cell phone, and my keys, tucked them in my pants pockets and left the purse at home on the shelf.

I’ve always admired women who travel light. My niece, Amy, loves to travel - as in all over the world - and she always takes little more than a backpack, something I’ve always regarded as testament to her self-confidence: she’s sure that no matter what happens, she will be able to handle it. (And she’s right.)

I once went on a 2-week cruise with the small-size carry-on suitcase and I still had room to bring home souvenirs, but when it comes to pocketbooks, that’s a different story.

This past summer Mother and I were vacationing at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, spending the hot part of the day browsing in the shops when I spied the cutest straw purse with a sparkling pink butterfly adorning it. It’s really something that would look better on the shoulder of my daughter Alison, but I bought it for myself anyway because, as I explained later to my mother and brother, it’s physical reinforcement for what I’m trying to do in my life: choose. I will not be able to get everything in the finite amount of space inside this pocketbook any more than I can cram everything into this one life I call mine. I will have to choose what to put in to take with me and what to let go of and leave out.

It’s not something I excel at: choosing. Oh, I make decisions all the time, but I seldom choose in the intimate, important sense of the word.

And, for the life of me, I don’t k now when I stopped or forgot how.

I like options. I enjoy change. I value individual differences and preferences. I am a seeker, curious, a lover of questions. Are these things an inherent part of creativity and thus impede choosing? Did my choosing muscle atrophy because somewhere along the way I developed an allergy to commitment? Is it because I became too much a pleaser, one who spent a veritable lifetime looking outward for validation and answers? Because I feel inadequate when explaining or worse, defending, my choices?

In graduate school, I met a woman named Paula who, for her fiftieth birthday, left her husband for a woman and enrolled in graduate school. One semester, Paula and I met a few days before the residency, and Paula shared her idea of facilitating groups where women were allowed and encouraged to form and share their opinions. “How did women get to this point in their life and not even know what they think?” she asked in bewilderment. “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know how that happened,” silently adding “to me.”

I talked to another friend, Sherry, just last weekend. Sherry’s husband, Ray, died last spring, and she’s been redoing her house, one room at a time. First the bedroom then the kitchen. “I just keep throwing things out,” she said, hastening to add almost apologetically, “It’s not that I’m trying to erase Ray from my life. It just feels right. I just can’t help it.” She is, I think, helping her physical environment support her. She is recreating her physical environment just as she is recreating her life. She is choosing what stays and what goes. She is choosing what comes in and what leaves. Choosing. She is choosing.

And so today I go back to work sifting and sorting and saving photos on my computer, searching for the one particular photo I once chose to be the header on my blog. Deciding which photos stay and which ones go. Emptying my digital trashcan . . . or not. Selecting another photo to use if I can’t find the one I want.

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Choosing

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