By Staff
Leada Gore, Editor
My sister-in-law, Ieleen, is an avid scrapbooker. Every photo she has ever taken is neatly put away in an album, with all the subjects identified and the date noted. Even more, she has all sorts of creative things going on in her scrapbooks, such as pretty paper seashells on the page with their photos from the beach and bright paper candles on the birthday pages.
Ieleen has moved beyond just preparing scrapbooks for herself and her family. She sells the scrapbooking materials and teaches classes in scrapbooking. She's tried to get me to take one of these classes for years.
"My own sister-in-law hasn't even taken a class," she will say.
So far, I've managed to change the subject every time it rears its brightly colored paper head.
Ieleen is persistent, though. For my wedding, she gave me a scrapbook that was to serve as my guest register as well. This required that I do something to it, as it would be less than appropriate to have people sign in on a blank page in a blank book. Not wanting to appear uncouth, I managed to cut out some paper shapes (they were ragged at best) and tape them to the pages and then plop some photos down on top.
I guess you could say it was a inpatient person's attempt at scrapbooking.
I hesitate to admit this, mainly because I know Ieleen reads this and will show up at my house with an armful of books and three paper cutters, but most of my photos are in a cardboard box in the closet.
Some of them are in albums, most of which came from a dollar store.
The rest of the photos are just loose in the bottom of the box, mainly because I keep thinking they don't qualify for an album, even if it did cost just $1.
There's the photo of me in my 20s sitting on a concrete turtle at the Washington Zoo. There's another one from New Orleans in 1993 that, if you look real hard, you can see former Alabama football coach Gene Stallings walking through the hotel lobby on his way to win a national college football championship. Yet another shows a big yellow fish swimming in a tank in the Chattanooga aquarium. I don't know when that photo was taken and can't imagine why I would have wanted a picture of a yellow fish in the first place.
The truth of the matter is, I'm never going to put these photos in any sort of order. I probably won't write the names of the subjects or the dates they were taken on the back, even though I know I should.
They will all just stay in the box where they belong, a jumbled mess of memories, duplicate prints and overexposed film.
I hope Ieleen doesn't find out.