A Retrospective of a Retrospective

Last weekend we celebrated my dad's 25 years as an ordained pastor. His current church had a big dinner with stories and presents and a song their music director wrote that was pretty funny. People from some of his old churches came, too, which was nice. I found that I've been disconnected from my parents' regular church life for so long that I only knew maybe ten people in the room. And five of them were people to whom I'm related.

So for me, the bulk of the evening was me watching the looping slideshow of pictures from my dad's life, basically since my parents were married (since those are the pictures my mom had for them to use). As the first child, there are lots of pictures with me in them, quite a few less for my sister, and then it picks back up a bit for pictures of the baby sister. It must be one of those phenomena that when you have more people in the family that are capable of using a camera, it cancels out birth order in the standard decline in the number of pictures for each subsequent child. Regardless, I really enjoyed watching pictures of my family's life progressing from the mid-seventies when my parents were these cute little hippies. My dad had long curly hair, and he was slim back then. My mom also had long hair, and I'm sure there were pictures where she wasn't wearing a bra, despite the number of times she says she didn't participate in that particular social protest. Then there's pictures of me, and I was an awfully cute baby. And then my parents began to turn into the roly-poly folks they are now. I did this to them, you see.

Anyway, that was the part that was fun for me. Reminiscing about when times were good and when times were really not so good, but looking at how life progresses through pictures, and what kinds of things those pictures cause a person to remember. Oh, and laughter at my dad's expense. That's always fun.