Going digital

To get our possessions down to Honda Civic size we went digital with everything we could. We scanned photographs and threw the prints away. We ripped music CDs and Craigs-listed the disks. We emptied our bookcases and donated, gave away and sold all of our books.

Some of the decisions were hard. I had carried my high school yearbooks with me from home to home for forty years. I had collected Folio Society books for thirty years. I had LPs that I had purchased in high school, first generation records of The Beatles, Dylan, Simon & Garfunkle.

But we were ruthless. I rationalized that it was the ideas of the novels that mattered, and I carry those with me. It is the music that springs to mind unbidden and the mood that the songs evoke that matter, not the album liner notes or the silvery disks. It is the memories that the childhood photographs summon, not the prints or slides that matter.

Of course all this is much easier with technology, right?

That's me on the left with big brother John and our first dog, Duke.

I scanned in all of my photographs and paid Scan Cafe 30 cents a slide to convert my trays of slides into more portable strings of electrons. Thousands of images are now safely (?) stored on my laptop, backed-up on an external drive and uploaded to a cloud server, sort of like draw-string pants and a belt and a pair of suspenders.

Same with the music. Books are now in my Nook or Kindle or Asus tablet. And I use the public library ($8 for a 3-month membership here in Myrtle Beach).

From the cloud server I share the photos and videos with my kids. They can digitally revisit their childhoods, they can look at ours, they can wander into the visual history of the family wherever they are.

And I live a little more in the present.