Photographs, Keepsakes and Remembrances: Staying connected to who you are and all the people who matter most

One of the great joys in life is getting old enough that you start learning things from your children. My smart, funny, and beautiful daughter is a saver. She has an Army sweatshirt she stole from me 17 years ago. My brother Mike gave me that sweatshirt on a long distant Christmas. I always wondered where it went. She confessed to the theft in an accidental phone call I made to her tonight. I was meaning to call my friend Doug and dialed her number by mistake. It was a good mistake, the kind I should make more of. I never call her enough, and our accidental conversation was a glowing reminder of how good life can be. I don't even want the sweatshirt back. It flatters me that she still has it, and there is a remarkable symmetry in it. Uncle Mike has always been her favorite (my charming, giving, brother Mike, the handsome blond with the quick deprecating wit and piercing blue eyes, is every nieces' favorite uncle) and now Stephanie is an Army wife, the wife of a proud, good soldier who will help guard the new President of the United States when he parades down Pennsylvania Avenue for his inaugural, forty-five and a half remarkable years after the March on Washington. When I called the proud, good soldier was playing on the carpet with his baby son, the fishing game. Thomas tosses Ethan the corner of a baby blanket, Ethan grabs it and he reels him in, pulling him toward him for a squeeze and a tickle. Delight ensues. Toss and repeat. In the perfect game everyone wins. Play as many perfect games as you can. Stephanie and I used to play Indiana Jones in the wilds of Willamette Park. The park also had an old wooden outdoor stage and we would put on an imaginary show. Stephanie was maybe eight. She loved "Grease" and made me do the John Travolta part: "I got chills, they're multiplyin' and I'm loooooosing control-ol. It's electrifying!" Our call made me remember that. It's good to remember. We forget how precious our stupid little games are. Toss a blanket to someone you love tonight and reel them in. You'll be glad you did.

As I write this Marie is organizing and tidying up and she is setting pictures in the spots where they will be hung. A portrait of two girls playing with sand buckets and shovels reminds her of her girls. Long ago a good friend of hers, Nellie, painted a mermaid on a rock in Crescent Bay, with beautiful blonde long flowing hair, and the mermaid is Marie, alluring, a little elusive, independent and playful, a little mysterious. I am so glad, so deeply glad, for the night she swum up to me. There is our framed portrait of the legendary Norman Sylvester, the soulful man whose music brought us together, and the painting her daughters made for her, a blue cottage with a round red roof with three tall trees under a golden sun. There's a light glowing from within the cottage. The colors are soothing and the collaborative effort that created it makes it priceless. It looks like a place you would want to visit and drink Corona beer under the shade of those tall trees. Squeeze the lime in your life, and squeeze out all the juice you can. Remember to buy more limes, more pictures, and save more memories, because your connection to those you love is the thing that makes you the alive whole person you are, the person that belongs to something and left a mark in the world. The memories are why we are here; the connections are the essence of hope.

I write and Marie putters we stop for another embrace and a snatch of conversation, another moment of reveling how good it feels to be together in our own home and share the warmth and intimacy of caring for one another and being safe in our own rooms. What a despair Christmas would have been without this. Thank God it was saved. The love of a good woman can transform a man in ways that are magical and mysterious. I got sexy the first time she kissed me. I became handsome the first time she laid eyes on me. I have been shown what real life and real joy can be, and I am never going back to my bleak empty solitary life.

Pandora radio is playing "Lenny" by Stevie Ray Vaughn, another legend, another soulful artist who speaks directly to your heart and the best possible place in your most hopeful soul. My mother loved Stevie Ray Vaughn and all good music from Frank Sinatra to Eric Clapton, and there are a handful of songs I can't hear without thinking of her, and it is so good to have the tug of that remembrance.

But Stephanie saves everything. She has a shell I sent her when she was a small girl, and a letter that went with it. We used to play Clue in character, complete with arch and dramatic English accents, and the letter is written from Mr. Green to Mrs. Peacock. She's saved it 24 years and the paper is brown, and her telling me she still had it was her way of telling me I hadn't been an awful Dad: she knew that she was loved.

Among her pictures is one of a trip we took to Mount St. Helens. We saw two spotted baby deer and walked to the rim of the volcano. My friend Parker came, and it was one of the last few times I spent with him, before he grew tired of my self-absorbed cloddishness and we lost touch. Maybe one day I'll see him again. I miss him and wonder where his life has led him. Now Pandora is playing "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" by Bob Dylan, and the haunting harmonica carries me back to the dim reaches of time when I had hair. Stephanie has another picture taken in the pool at the apartment in Parkrose in 1995. I wonder the story my face tells in that picture. I remember a scene in the Shawshank Redemption when Red is before the parole board and he's telling them what he would say to the photo of his young self. Every once in a while we should bring out the photos of our young selves, and see what those photos have to say to us. The present is the only place we can live, or should, but the past has so many reasons and needs that tell us everything we need to know to embrace the future, and our immediate futures ought to be embraced with a fierce grip of hope, a belief that our lives matter and the people close to us need to hear how much we love and need them, that nothing can replace the precious place they hold in our shoe box full of memories and keepsakes. Our lives are about filling the next shoe box, and saving it till the paper turns brown. Store the memories and live them, and never give them up.

I realize with a fresh joy tonight that wherever I go the few precious people I love are always with me, and no matter how fiercely I love them my deepest commitment and deepest joy is the remarkable mermaid in the next room, who swam to me on a magical summer night and swam back after a violent storm. Pandora is playing Buddy Guy: "...the gates of heaven must have opened: I just saw an angel just go by." I'm going now to kiss my angel. Kiss your angels often, before time rips them away from you and sends them back to heaven.