Gotta Get a Round Toit

Technology a tool to preserve family history
By Kelvin Wade
January 14, 2010

Life can take some unexpected turns. I walked out of a doctor's appointment last week feeling great. The previous day I'd had a mystery 102.4 degree fever. But at my doctor's office, my temperature was normal. Everything was fine. I'd just received blood work back and most everything was great for someone my age and general medical history.

Twenty-four hours later, I'm in the ER with a leg infection, swimming in morphine once again pondering the fragility of life.

Lately, Tony has been posting a lot of old photos of the family on Facebook. Some of them evoke a lot of fun, wistful memories. Still others only remind one of the silliness of youth.

Early on in my relationship with Cathi, she suggested we make books for my parents that they could fill with memories of their lives. When they were finished writing down special memories, inserting photos and making audiotapes, we would present the finished books to my nieces and nephews as part of their legacy.

My parents were both excited about the idea. Unfortunately, like a lot of the things we want to do in life, they failed to find the right tool. The Round Toit. If we could get a Round Toit, so many things in our lives would get done. They're hard to come by. So my parents never finished the books.

However, after our father passed away in 2003, we were surprised to find among his possessions that he did actually start working on his book. And our mother had started working on hers.

On Tuesday morning, the day I was released from the hospital, I received an e-mail from my brother Tony. He'd found a four-page journal our mother had done of her early life and e-mailed it to me and my brothers.

I hadn't seen the piece in a long time and I remembered that when I'd first read it, it sparked a most interesting dialogue with my mother. There are so many things you can talk to your parents about when you're an adult that you would have never dreamed possible as a child.

So on the same day I was being discharged from the hospital this week, the older woman across the hallway from me passed away. I didn't know her or her family but I'm sure she had a story to tell. And now I see that with Tony posting all of these old photos and documents like my mother's high school diploma from San Augustine Colored High School, he's just been completing the grandma/grandpa books we started years ago.

Now I'm going through my old photos. I have our father's diploma from the same high school as our mom's. I have love letters from my mother to my father written in the 1950s shortly after he joined the Navy.

What I'm saying is we all have the opportunity to put our family's history right into cyberspace for future generations. Photos no longer have to discolor and decompose in attics. We have the ability to preserve photos and videos so our descendants many years in the future will see them.

And it doesn't take a very big Round Toit to do it. Peace.

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NOTES. I apologize for any typos or what have you. I'm still under medication.

Sometimes columns are put together over long periods of times. Or sometimes there are columns that are three quarters written that just require some updating in order to run. It's good to have a general purpose column floating around on your hard drive for emergencies. Other times, you're thrown into a situation you're unprepared for. This week, I hadn't expected to be in the hospital. And the hospital's wifi actually sucked.

I wasn't feeling particularly well and was on quite a bit of morphine and Norco for pain. So my mind wasn't the sharpest its been. It was really hard to focus on anything other than my recovery. I was shocked being back in the hospital so soon. It literally came out of the blue following an excellent doctor's visit.

I didn't think I had it within to me to write this week. And writing is important to me. I have not missed a deadline since starting this column in 1992. People tell me not to worry about it. I'm not getting a gold star or a cookie for consistently turning out columns. But it means something to me. It's a point of pride. But this week, I was so brain dead and weak from being in the hospital that I almost let it get the best of me.

So this week's column was actually the culmination of things I'd been thinking since my brother Tony started uploaded old family photos in the last week. It's important to me. I see lots of people uploaded old family photos and it's great. Future generations will have access to us in an unprecedented way. The actual column wasn't written until twenty minutes before my deadline. I hope it doesn't show too much.