I have written many times on the subject of how much I admire my daughter Pauline.
She has combined a wonderful career in the Foreign Service with a successful family life, difficult but hardly rare. But there is something she has been doing for years that I have never seen anyone else do.
Before I tell you exactly what it is, I need to tell you about someone who is practically a total opposite.
Me.
I have exactly seven photographs from the first three significant relationships of my adult life, one of them a marriage. Even now, with an iPhone 15 with an excellent camera, I forget to take pictures. Even on our Christmas cruise, I took just 19 pitchers in seven days.
Thankfully, Pauline isn’t like me. She takes so many pictures I think she might be part Japanese tourist.
Mike …
Yeah, yeah. Almost every Sunday night, wherever she is in the world, Pauline sends out a communique to relatives all over the world. It’s basically news of what Pauline, Johnathan and their six children did in the seven-day period just ended. Sometimes it’s big news, like when they took a vacation to the Sahara Desert. Sometimes it’s just what the kids did in school that week, or who got haircuts or other relatively mundane things.
But the communiques always contain photos, sometimes as few as six or seven and sometimes as many as 25-30.
Lex, Simon, Albanie, Coen and Arti. Malachi is off at college
So if any of our grandchildren find themselves wondering what they were doing in, say, March 2018, all they have to do is look. Pauline actually makes it easier than that. At the end of a calendar year, she assembles the narration and the photos into a hardbacked book.
I don’t know anyone else who has ever gone to this much trouble to keep a family history.
Don’t tell me my daughter isn’t amazing.
Beautiful too.
Ah, the family historian! How nice that you have one. It sounds like she does fine work, and what a lovely family she has. And also how nice that she appreciates the pleasures of lattes and croissants…:-)