Is There Memory For Another Memory?

The other night, I announced to the kids that I had a family project for them to work on that evening.  As I expected, this was met with rolled eyes, groans and murmurings about how lame a father I was.  But because my kids have compassion on me and all my lameness, they took part.  The mission was to file away some old photos into shoeboxes properly marked with the year they were taken.

Abbie and Christy were the most help.  Alec sort of sat near us, and only took special interest when cute pictures of him as a baby came up.  Evan and Maya wondered why anyone would actually print pictures instead of having them just randomly appear on the family computer screen saver. 

We had boxes for each year of our marriage, dating back to 1989, and even a box full of pictures from before we were married.  I love looking at old pictures, but I'm often amazed at some of the pictures we keep around.  To me, pictures fall into one of three categories:

1.  Great pictures that we will one day put into slideshows to show at our kids wedding receptions.
2.  Pictures that capture a moment in time worth remembering, even if it wasn't the most flattering moment, which we are forced to keep around just so we can pull them out later and make fun of each other.
3.  Pictures that should not be kept because they are a) out of focus, b) full of people we don't recognize, or c) of something that somebody saw once, who at the time thought would be great to capture on film but lacked the forethought to include an actual person in the picture, and so therefore forced us to forever store something that anyone could easily pull up with a simple Google image search.

Of course, we keep that last category.  After all we paid for it to be developed.  We can't throw it away.  Besides, with the digital age in full swing now, we don't have to worry about having to develop and store such pictures anymore.  We can just delete those bad pictuers off the computer without it costing us anything, right?  Right?  Can't we?

Kid:  "Dad, what are you doing?"
Dad:  "I'm deleting these bad pictures off the computer."
Kid:  "Don't!!  Stop!  Mom, Dad's deleting pictures again!"
Dad:  "But, it's just a blurry, fuzzy, poorly lit hint of somebody who's name we can't even recall."
Kid:  "It's a MEMORY!  Don't delete it!"
Dad:  "Yes, and it's taking up 3MB of MEMORY!"
Kid:  "Buy a bigger disk!  MOM!"

So, my life is spent sneaking down to the computer in the middle of the night and deleting pictures under cover of darkness.  The only problem is they're taking them faster than I can delete them, and so, like the multiple shoeboxes full of photos, both good and bad, that already consume an entire closet in our house, my new 1 Terabyte hard drive is already 3/4 full of blurry tree branches, somebody's toy, or the tail end of what looks to be a dog that we may or may not own.  I'm fighting the battle 3MB at a time.  It's a lonely fight, and it's also one wrought with guilt each time I press Delete.  Because I know - it's a memory.  But I'm paying for that memory.  And so, I ask myself -- will it ever show up in wedding reception video?  No?  Can I use it as bribe in the future?  No?  Is it something I can't find in a Google search?  No?

Deleted.  For a brief moment, there's a slight pang of guilt.  Then I think - three megabytes saved.  Ahhh. Already I feel better.