Leaving Breadcrumbs

My wife and I drive past a facility that specializes in memory care. The sign encourages passersby to Call Today, and we joke, adding, “Before you forget.” We know, all too well, that before long, we’ll be amongst those whose memories have faded.

This week, I pulled a large plastic bin from the bottom shelf in the garage. I’ve been meaning to go through that bin for several years, and this was the week to tackle it. The bin contained photo albums from days long ago.

Some albums were automatically deemed keepers: Those of my son, those of family celebrations with aunts, uncles, cousins, and my Babas. Without a doubt, these photos will stay. I’ll never forget family, I tell myself.

The thinner albums – dated 1972 to 1998 – were marked with the names of colleges I’ve attended, places where I’ve been employed, and newspaper clippings of events and people. The more recent were the most familiar. I smiled as I turned the pages. Most of the photos did not have names written on the backs, because when they were set into those peel‑and‑stick albums, I KNEW everyone.

As I turned another page, I felt a small tug of unease. I recognized the curve of a smile, the tilt of a head, the way someone held a beer can at a party — but the names hovered just out of reach. It startled me. These were people I once laughed with, confided in, maybe even loved in the way young people love their companions in passing seasons. The faces stared up at me, patient and expectant, as though waiting for me to call them by name. I whispered an apology to the ones I couldn’t place. “I knew you once,” I said. “I promise I did.”

Maybe this is how forgetting begins — not with the big things, but with the edges softening first. The outlines blur long before the center gives way.

My wife wandered in and peered over my shoulder. “Who’s that?” she asked.

I laughed at myself — the woman who swore she’d never forget a face, now squinting at a photo of a girl wearing a sundress and a straw hat, her arm draped around my shoulders.

“No idea,” I said. “But we obviously knew each other.”

We both laughed, but it wasn’t the same kind of laugh as the one we shared when we passed the memory care sign. This one had a tremor in it, as if realizing that we noticed the changes in our memories, and acknowledging—lightly—that time is moving.

 I thought of my mother, who used to flip through her own albums, tapping a finger on faces she could no longer name. “Good people,” she would say, when the names escaped her. “All good people.”  I used to think it was sad that she had forgotten so much. But now, I realized she hadn’t lost everything. She remembered the feeling of them. The warmth. The goodness.

Maybe that’s what lasts longest — not the names, but the way someone made you feel in the brief season you shared.

I wondered who would open these albums after me. Would my son flip through them someday, trying to piece together the woman I was before he knew me? Would he recognize the girl in the bell-bottoms? Would he care?

After several hours of reminiscing, I set the plastic bin filled with photo albums back on the shelf in the garage.

Maybe that’s why we take photos — not to remember the people in them, but to leave breadcrumbs for the ones who come after us.