Shoe Box

Some time in the summer, at the end of an academic year when Obama was 17 years old, a party was thrown in Hawaii. The old picture of Obama and his date in that party was recently taken out of his schoolmate's shoe box, and shown to the readers of Time magazine.

The years have gone by in the blink of an eye, and oh, photographs are no longer developed. Gone is the day of putting old photographs in an album or shoe box. For about as long as the Internet has existed, the photos of teenagers are more often stored on Facebook than in a shoe box. A few mouse clicks give them the digital footprints. Long lasting one, and easily retrievable. It's almost like a diary online for a myriad of stories, starting from the dish at a restaurant to the ceremony of tying the knot. Letters are giving way to electronic mails, and shoe boxes are giving way to Inbox.

When shoe boxes packed with old memories were as big a part of many old guys' treasure chests, we had to make sure the shoe box wasn't thrown away when we moved. Part of the challenge of maintaining the shoe box is the need to keep buying sachets of dehumidifier. Back in my home and office, I have been making use of boxes to keep track of history. Everything. Clinical photographs captured in slides (something you can't see without a slide projector), a handwritten letter written by my mentor (after I failed in a postgraduate professional examination), and hundreds of letters from my wife during my year of overseas training. Boxes are small, I know, when you think about the size of Dropbox nowadays. My boxes, however, capture far more things than Dropbox can hold.