We’re not really sentimental folks, my husband and I—anyway, not in the sense of memento collector or souvenir keeper. We travel sans camera and keep no albums for pictures we don’t take.

Not that I’ve been always like this. As a young girl, I collected signatures of friends along with their good wishes in an autograph book. It was my incredibly photogenic mom who just loved to have pictures taken of every occasion, such that her photographer became a necessary intrusion in every family affair.

The pictures for each occasion were delivered in eight-by-twelves, already collected in an album. The obsession burned until she passed on, at 85, so you can imagine her pictorial treasury.

Deep pain

Alas, for some heirs, such remembrances could sometimes trigger deep pain in lonely old age, as in the case of another album collector whom I’d grown fond of. She died at 93.

Sentimental, too, and organized, she, like Mom, took pride in her own collection of pictures and souvenirs. She recounted that, at 18, she had been swept off her feet by her future husband, a much older man who died after less than a decade of marriage, leaving her widowed before she was 30, with two small children.

For such few years, she built an amazing collection of photographed memories. She said she didn’t know what was more tragic, his sudden death or her discovery of a lovechild, born, though, many years before their marriage.

She remarried 10 years later, and this time the union lasted many years. But, in her late 60s, she caught her unfaithful husband before he could be safely dead. He, who so far as she knew worked in the office all day and late into the night, had somehow managed to keep another family with children as young as her own preteen grandchildren. She threw him out—into the mistress’ waiting arms.

From the shock brought to her by each infidelity, she managed to rebuild her life, but confessed that the lying pictures made her feel worse than the harsh attrition of age revealed in the comparison between now and then, not only pictorially but physically.

Fortunate

It’s only natural, I guess, that pictures evoke the sharpest feelings and sentiments associated with them. I feel myself fortunate that, even if I don’t stock them, old pictures always make me smile. That’s why there’s a part of me that admires people who keep a record of everything.

I’m awed, for example, by cousin Ninit and old pal since grade school Gigi Carlos, who both—bless their hearts!—have kept records and mementos of our youth. And since my life is tied in very much with theirs, they have saved me the trouble.

As a young mom, I recorded my children’s early years, having naturally picked up Mom’s habit, until they got older and took over from me. But by then technology had left me behind. Besides I had also started to look awful in pictures. As Dad would say, “The old cameras were kinder.”

When my first marriage ended, I stored our family albums at Mom’s and somehow forgot all about them. One day her basement got flooded and most of our pictures were damaged, and I felt saddened by the irreplaceable loss. For a while I stopped recording events, until my youngest granddaughter arrived.

It is she who has me taking pictures again with my cellphone, but, since Vergel is the undisputed better photographer, he’s been taking most of them as well as of his own grandchildren. But somehow we both appear rarely, if at all, in the pictures.

Reminders

Whenever I sit down to write my column, I seem able, sans graphic reminders, to reach deep into my, albeit selective, memory. In lieu of pictures, old songs, particular foods, familiar aromas trigger it for me. Retelling stories forces me to organize thoughts and pictures in my mind, and as surely as one thought leads to another, one memory leads to another. In the process, the past is made not only fresh again, perhaps because seen in a fresh light, but also, hopefully, relevant to others, resonant.

I feel fortunate indeed to have this, my own personal space, every Sunday. I can bring back to life characters I miss and relive events. It’s this space that serves as my very own album of memories.

Oh, and I thought I wasn’t sentimental.