Unless he is an elementary-school art teacher, a middle-aged adult should not be wielding a glue stick. Of this, I am fairly certain. Yet, if you had followed me on a recent family vacation you would have seen a weary-looking figure hunched over a hotel-room table every night, equipped with not only a glue stick but Scotch tape, coloured markers, scissors and Sharpies. Around him would have been spread an unruly collection of postcards, theatre tickets, museum maps, brochures and receipts.
If you have deduced that he is making a vacation scrapbook, congratulations. If you imagine him surrounded by his loving wife and children, merrily reliving the adventures of the day as they glue mementoes into the book together, think again. When I scrapbook, I usually scrapbook alone.
This is not how it was supposed to turn out. When I first proposed scrapbooking a trip, I thought it would be a great way to spend some family time while recording the experience for posterity. My father, a Mad Men-era advertising executive with the square jaw and sharp suits of Don Draper, brought scrapbooks on our 1960s car trips to New York, Detroit, Chicago and Nantucket. Making use of his ad skills, he helped with the layout. My younger brother and I wrote the misspelled captions.
“The wateress in Albany gave me this,” I wrote next to a brown Tootsie Roll wrapper. Those scrapbooks sit in my living-room bookcase still. Every time I open their yellowed pages, the tide of memory rolls in.When I try to enlist my own offspring in the joy of scrapbooking, their eyes roll skyward. At the end of a long day on the tourist trail, they would rather chill in front of an online movie or loll with a magazine on a hotel bed than snip and glue with their obsessive father. It is me who reminds everyone to keep their subway-ticket stubs, me who embarrasses everybody by filching restaurant menus, me who saves the miniature-golf score cards and plastic ice-cream spoons and, at the end of every day, me who writes up a log of our activities beside the scraps of memorabilia.
Why do I persist? Not for the fun of it, that’s for sure. It’s a pain to sit down every evening and try to make sense of the day’s scraps while everyone else relaxes. Not because I’m any good at it either. Though my spelling has improved since the age of nine, my layout skills peaked at the level of a Grade 5 history project. My idea of creativity is to paste postcards on the page at a jaunty angle. My captions often have the “just the facts, ma’am” quality of a police report. “We visited the 9/11 memorial at 10:30 on a cold grey morning.” Not for nothing do the “kids” – now 23, 20 and 13 – snicker at my feeble efforts.
But, in the hopeful way of all parents, I like to think they will thank me one day. Beside those old spiral-bound scrapbooks from my youth, a line of our own now stands on the shelf, each filled with glorious memories.
There was the time we got lost on a hike in the mountains above Delphi and thought we were goners; the moment time we discovered the best gelato in the world, at Vivoli in Florence; the time during a visit to Rome when my middle daughter, then 11, stared in awe at a huge statue in St. Peter’s and exclaimed “Jesus!”; the time when my other daughter, 4, asked, after being hauled through yet another historic castello, “Is everything in Italy basically old?”; the day time when my wife wondered helpfully as we wove through mad traffic on the way to Athens, “I wonder how many people are killed every day on Greek highways.”
That last one merited the trademark Quote of the Day symbol, a feature of all our scrapbooks. Others include, “You hit the fish on the head,” a classic from my confused older daughter; “I can’t wait till yesterday,” from the youngest; and the verdict of the youngest on the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, “I would renovate.”
The artifacts pasted in those cluttered pages include pigeon feathers collected in St. Mark’s Square in Venice; a lemon-tree leaf from outside our hotel in Nafplio, Greece, that always reminds us of that gorgeous scent; seaweed from a cove on Saltspring Island in British Columbia; a leaflet from the night we saw Helen Mirren play the Queen on a London stage; and a juvenile drawing of Cheepo, the tiny, ferocious dog in our Istanbul hotel that found my ankles so tasty.
When I get back from a trip, I print up photos and paste them in the book as well (tip: always leave blank pages in between daily reports to allow for this), so the scrapbooks double as albums. I post pictures on Facebook, too, but there is something different about having a physical book that you can pick up and flip through together.
Despite their boycott of most of the scrapbooking work, the girls sometimes sit down after we get home from a trip and improve on my work by jazzing up the captions and adding splashes of colour in felt pen. Not long ago, after weeks of nagging, I persuaded the 13-year-old to help me fill in the gaps of a scrapbook from this year’s March Break trip to New York.
“I love looking back at scrapbooks,” she said as we drew. “It reminds me of how awesome it was – all the inside jokes and stuff like that. I always complain about scrapbooking, but I really like it. When I grow up it’s going to be mandatory for my kids, or you get a fine or chores or something.”
To which I say: Good luck with that.