KAREN WIGHT -- No Place Like Home

Say the word “scrapbook” in a room full of mothers, and you will hear

a hush fall over the crowd. The topic is taboo for many, and only talked

about in whispered tones by others. Scrapbooks are a mixed bag of joy,

guilt, wonder and dread: Every child’s sweet collection of memories, and

every parent’s secret nightmare.

Scrapbooks don’t have to be scary. I think we put a lot of pressure on

ourselves to make them perfect when passable will do just fine. It’s

better to have pages filled with random birthday party pictures,

invitations and school photos than no page at all, and once you start,

it’s amazing how much easier it becomes as time rolls by.

When I started Annie’s first album 15 years ago, I was happy just to

get photos pasted on the page. Forget all about background papers, photo

cropping, borders, stickers, handwritten memories -- just get the darn

pictures glued in a book and call it good. I was happy to barely keep the

photos in some semblance of chronological order. For her first three

years, I pulled a few photos out of every roll of film and glued them in

a scrapbook. Done.

As she got a little older, she began to enjoy looking at the “Annie

Book.” She, like all of us, loved to look at herself as a baby, remember

birthday parties and talk about grandparents, friends and neighbors. She

liked critiquing her parents (especially the bad choices of sunglasses by

the mother), watching Mom get fat when her brother was born, laugh at how

goofy Breck was when he was a baby. The Annie Book became a favorite and

was pulled off the bookshelf often.

I began to understand this chore called a scrapbook was indeed more

than that. This was an important connection for my children to find their

place in the family and beyond. It gave them perspective on time, the

growing family, holidays and themselves. I realized the scrapbooks

deserved more time and attention than I had given them previously.

About the time I began to pay more attention to our albums, a company

called Creative Memories came along and revolutionized scrapbooking.

Acid-free papers, pens, stickers, borders -- you name it, they have it.

The company offered creative layout recommendations, encouraged sales

representatives to have home parties to “crop ‘til you drop” and took

scrapbooks into the competitive world of capitalism. God bless America.

Archival-quality products are everywhere these days. I think the drug

stores even carry products labeled “acid-free” for scrapbook aficionados.

I’m spoiled. I still like to sort through my Creative Memories catalog,

call my sales rep, get new page ideas and get my scrapbook “battery”

recharged a couple of times a year.

The scrapbooks are still growing; I’m on Annie’s third book. Two and a

half more years of high school, then I’ll let her start her own project

for her college years and beyond. The other two kids have benefited from

my learning curve with the first one, and each have books that they

treasure.

As testimony to the covenant of scrapbooking, I submit for evidence

these two incidents that have occurred in the past month in our house:

Exhibit One: Annie, 15, had her high school teammates over for dinner

one night and, as part of the after-dinner merriment, pulled out her --

you guessed it -- scrapbooks. Here are 20 high school athletes, flipping

through the pages, (probably to look for dirt on Annie). They end up

going through the entire series, each one commenting about some silly

thing or another, and then they all sit around and talk about the things

that have stood out most in their own childhoods. Tender moments,

traumatic moments: It was a moment in itself.

Exhibit Two: Sixth-grade son, feeling fairly proud of his “maturity”

as all sixth-graders do, asks to sit down with Mom before bed one night

to “just talk about the baby books.” Lots of questions, lots of laughs

(boy, did I have a lot of big shoulder pads in 1989) and again, a chance

to share about grandparents no longer with us, pets that no longer sleep

at the foot of the bed and friends who have come and gone.

So you see, a scrapbook is not just a scrapbook. It’s a little bit of

personal history that’s worth recording. And even though I might wince at

the work that goes into them, the efforts are well-rewarded.

* KAREN WIGHT is a Newport Beach resident. Her column runs Saturdays.