My life on earth is reasonably well documented in photos, thanks to my father, who had always owned some kind of camera and had been snapping away since I was a baby.
Growing up, I realized the value of capturing memories through images I could readily access and look back on. So, when I was younger, I collected older photos in print. As I got older and as technology progressively allowed, I stored digital albums in one platform or another.
I never had the discipline to learn the basics of taking a good photograph like my father could. But I do credit him for my acknowledgement and love of pictures as reminders of life’s greatest moments.
More importantly, I credit my father for being there not only during most of my life’s greatest moments but also many of the little ones. The ones that are too small to be photographed but are engrained in my memory nonetheless. Like when he soldered some wires into overlapping sine, cosine and tangent graphs, so that I would have the most banging project in Trigonometry class (nerd). Or when he randomly initiated popsicle and ice cream bar pickups from convenience stores. Or when he set shopping budgets for me and my sisters, allowing me to waste money on stuffed toys as my older sister bought books and my younger sister kept the cash to save for bigger, better things.
I believe a lot of my weirdness comes from my father. But I am thankful because having him as a father had given me stories that go beyond what pictures could tell. Having him as a father had both literally and figuratively made the snapshots of my life… a lot more colorful.
Happy Father’s Day, Papa. I miss and love you!
Incandescent Life 