Preserving the Past Part 1: Revisiting the Scrapbooks I Made in Primary School

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had an obsession with preserving the past and a fear of losing it. Like many kids, I used to fantasize about what I’d do if I ever became rich, and one of my recurring fantasies was to one day build a private museum that stored the memories of myself and those close to me. I pictured an extensive bunker packed with exhibits of the past. Naturally there would be photos and home movies, but also treasured toys, childhood drawings, old football boots, Tae Kwon-Do belts, trading card collections, favorite books, and so on. Things I had no use for but which, through their preservation, ensured that the past wouldn’t one day become inaccessible to me.

One of the things my school friends and I used to do a lot was relive our experiences down the years. We were very much a group of storytellers, and it was pretty common for us to simply ask each other “Tell the story of ____ again.”

We would gleefully sit back and listen, encouraging whomever it was that was doing the telling to spare no detail. By retelling the same stories over and over, we prevented the memories from fading away. More than that, we found that the act of telling them was akin to a limited form of time travel. On some level, we were reliving the memories. By the time we were 15…