Scrapbook Photo Album Quotes

At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people.

snapshots to remember in our mental scrapbooks and throw away the bad? Perhaps all photo albums should bear the subtitle “The Past—The Way You Want to Remember It.

he got up and went and picked up this book, an oversized photo album, and brought it back to the table. “I’ve been following you,” he said, and he opened it up. It was a scrapbook of everything I had ever done, every time my name was mentioned in a newspaper, everything from magazine covers to the tiniest club listings, from the beginning of my career all the way through to that week.

The first page held a picture of a hazel blossom that Catherine had drawn. It had been pulled from its file, laminated with clear plastic, and secured to the album with gold photo corners. Below the drawing was my daughter's name, Hazel Jones-Hastings, in Elizabeth's elegant script, and her birthday, March 1, which wasn't her birthday at all.