This year, I set aside a day of vacation to unpack the car, do laundry, and ready to go back to work. Those tasks left me a few hours to begin dealing with the papers and photos I had brought back with me; I had sorted through most of Dad’s papers and photos while in Massachusetts, but I still had a couple of boxes to sort through, scanning those that were worth saving.<\/p>\n
I started with the easiest task. While in Massachusetts, I had divided Dad’s photos up among his three children; if a photo featured one of us prominently, I gave it to that child; and the other photos I divided randomly and evenly among us. The easiest task was this: take my share of the photos, sort them in chronological order, and put them into a photo album. That took me a couple of hours, and I showed Carol the photo album, and then I looked through it again on my own. When I had done all this, I was pretty sad — the worst part was looking at the photos of my mother the year before she died; I had forgotten how bad she looked — but I was nevertheless glad I had done it. I realized, too, that most of these photos just sat in boxes for years and years, for decades even, and we never looked at them. Now even if I don’t want to look through that photo album ever again, at least I have the option to do so, and that feels like a minor accomplishment.<\/p>\n
And that, I guess, is the real end to this summer’s road trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This year, I set aside a day of vacation to unpack the car, do laundry, and ready to go back to work. Those tasks left me a few hours to begin dealing with the papers and photos I had brought back with me; I had sorted through most of Dad’s papers and photos while in … Continue reading “San Mateo, Calif.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[693],"class_list":["post-6406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-road-trips","tag-2017-road-trip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6407,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6406\/revisions\/6407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}