Definitions

The old family dictionary caught my eye one day, lying unused on the shelf. I tried to remember the last time I had reached for it, and realized that I had moved houses at least three times since that forgotten day, and more than a decade had passed, perhaps closer to two decades. Any need for spelling or definition or pronunciation today has one reaching for phone, asking Alexa, or consulting Google. Suddenly that old dictionary loomed symbolic. Symbolic of life, language, community, and discourse prior to the advent of the World Wide Web and the mini-computers we each of us now carry about as an extension of ourselves. Symbolic of a simpler time, a more gracious time, a time marked, looking back, by freedoms forgotten and innocence lost. It hurt a bit to cut into it, but cut I must, excavating the past.

The idea is carried further by the inclusion of old letters, negatives, and photos - all discarded by some member of the original family, and found at some point by a member of my family in a dusty bin in a flea market or antique store. I find these bits of discarded history somehow sacred.

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