My New Album

I bought an actual physical photo album for the first time in, well, probably ever. I do have a bunch of albums already, old ones my mom bought me; all filled with memories from childhood, high school, college. You know, the old days when we didn’t always have cameras in our pockets, didn’t think about our “angles” or aesthetics; back when our “camera rolls” were actual film we took to get developed, debating whether to roll the dice on “doubles”.

My mom curated quite a few photo albums over the years, including some with the ring binders and sticky pages, the protective plastic film making a sound you probably remember only if you, like me, are old enough to have learned to type on an actual typewriter.

The last album she put together is one she talked about making for a long time. It’s also a favorite of mine. It features pictures of all of the cats that had padded into her life at one time or another.

Open the unassuming brown leather cover and you’ll see two photos of two kittens, one orange and one grey, both wide-eyed and lying in a box top. According to one of my dad’s early journals, they picked their new charges up on Sunday, November 9, 1958, just about five months after their wedding.

“A boy,” he wrote, “Caesar. And a girl: Cleopatra.”

They called her “Cleo” for short.

Caesar and Cleo were before my time, but I was around for the felines that followed, including: Missy, Pepper, and Bandit, who was always better known as The Weab for reasons too long to explain. Like most pets, all our cats rarely went by their government names. My sisters’ cats and my orange consigliere, the late Brian Williams, also made the cut. (My mom didn’t have a chance to meet my current orange boss, Fizz, but I know she would have lovingly called him “a wild beast.”)

I appreciate the storytelling inherent in this collection, a different way of looking at a life; and I think anyone who has ever welcomed a fuzzy creature into their home can appreciate, by the album’s very existence, how much love there was and how much it must have hurt to say goodbye when the time inevitably came.

That’s how it goes at a certain point, doesn’t it? We live our lives and, if we are lucky, we are left with photographs.

A favorite photo from my mother’s album

Once, during a conversation about weddings, I shared with my mother my firm belief that the photographer is the absolute most important day-of expense for any couple, an important investment.

“I mean, look at your wedding,” I said. “That’s what you have from that day: those pictures!”

“Well, I have your father!” She shot back, and we both dissolved into cackles.

My mom and dad, and my grandparents before them, and the ones before that all left behind any number of photographs, many relegated to boxes that once held brand-new tennis shoes. I’ve inherited the same habit. My own box of old photographs with “Loose Pictures” scrawled on the side in Sharpie has been with me since sometime in the late 1990s. Despite the vague label, I know what’s in there. Still, I recognize, when it comes to the best archival practices, putting loose pictures in a cardboard box is not ideal.

Looking now at this vast collection of family history before me, all in the same place for the first time in, well, probably ever, I feel compelled to preserve it properly.

Buying the album seemed like a good place to start.

I think a lot about why I care so much, and then I’ll turn over a picture to see someone’s taken the time to write names and dates, sometimes providing added context. It reveals a snapshot of humanity that transcends time, a universal thread running through every photo, every slide, even the negatives. There are unspoken pleas in the eyes on every face.

“Remember,” they seem to say. “We…were here.”

This essay originally appeared in my column in the July 23, 2026 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.