Mullis: Procrastination, photos and puncturing the blur

I’m a first-class procrastinator or, as we say in the newspaper world, “deadline driven.” Finding photos for my son’s graduation party wasn’t pretty.

I kept photo albums like a curator when I had a film camera. There were numbers on the spines and a short description of significant events on the inside covers. Then we went to Canada for two years, where half the albums made the move and the other half stayed in a closet in Battle Creek. When we returned home…well, I’m not exactly sure where they ended up.

Then, there are the digital photos. I used to organize them in files on my computer by date and significant event, like “2006 Christmas.” Then the computer died. Then the replacement computer died. Then the replacement-replacement computer died. I backed up these photos but now they have file names like “000x-afhelg.”

And then there are the hordes of photos that have come via email…Google keeps those, right?

I had five days until the party deadline, so I delegated the job to my graduating son.

Hey – I bought the display boards.

This had worked for my oldest. She went through the albums and computers like a hurricane. Her boards looked great, even if the albums and computers looked look like, well, a hurricane went through them.

My son is no hurricane. He’s a procrastinator, like me. I asked him to look through the digital files and he ended up watching clips of The Tonight Show on YouTube.

Desperate, I asked my youngest to try. She found about 20 photos and then started watching clips of The Tonight Show on YouTube.

Twenty photos? I’ve been to these other grad parties. I can’t show up with only 20 photos. So I went through the photos…and ended up watching clips of The Tonight Show on YouTube.

Moral of the story? Don’t keep your photos next to the Internet.

I printed what we had and spread them out over the display boards. It looked anemic.

My son shrugged.

“Do you have, like, baby photos of me?”

Of course, I do! I’m a procrastinator, not a monster.

I tore apart the closets until I found all the photo albums. I piled them on the coffee table and told my son to get off his phone and start looking.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

Ever since I became a mom, my life has been a blur. Those photos punctured that blur with details I had forgotten I remembered.

Like how my son took apart everything from the dishwasher to the kitchen cupboards. And how my kids were always wearing costumes, except for my son on Halloween. He didn’t like dressing up for Halloween, although he sometimes played piano as Spider-Man.

There were lots of lopsided birthday cakes and group photos where my siblings’ yet-to-be spouses looked young and shy. There was a photo of my youngest with her cousin of the same age. They are inseparable now, but not so enamored with each other as 3-year-olds.

There was the day I chopped my hair to just below my ear and the Christmas morning that looked like the aftermath of a ticker tape parade. I found a Polaroid of my grandparents and my young kids squeezed together on the same chair and another of my husband working in the yard with our son dozing in a pack on his back.

We finished the boards, but I couldn’t stop staring at them. They bore the marks of procrastination, but mostly they bore witness to the fact that he was happy, we were happy, and it wasn’t just a blur.

Nicole L.V. Mullis is the author of “A Teacher Named Faith.” You can reach her at nlvm.columns@gmail.com or www.NicoleLVMullis.com.