A recent commercial by Google’s Chrome browser reminded me of this — I’m linking to it below, it’s called “Dear Sophie”:
Dear Sophie

This pretty much captures the vision of what I want to create for my own children. I’m expecting our second baby any day/moment now (we’re three days overdue), and I think I’ll start our little Karina her own Gmail account to share with Daddy. I love the quick entries, the varying media used (everything from maps to scans to video & pictures), and how each one offers a different perspective on life growing up.

I wrote a while back about a “Hospital” playlist I used with our first child’s birth. I’m working on the second playlist right now, something that is unique to each child and they can carry with them for the rest of their lives, a Playlist From Birth. It’s little efforts like these that we, as parents, can do to create better connections with our children, at any age.

So to speak.

I didn’t exactly throw them out entirely… instead, I like to think I just made them really, really, really small.

With the blessing of my IT guy at work, I used the copier to scan my reams of notes and turn them into PDF documents. So now those 6 boxes of notes all fit on one nifty thumb drive… and a backup on my computer. And an automated Mozy backup of my computer.

In other words, my notes are:

1. More protected from the elements than they were before
2. More accessible to me should I ever wish to reference them again
3. once again enjoyed as a journey down memory lane

It really was an enjoyable experience heading into the office on evenings and weekends to complete the project. It reminded me of the care-free days of college, when the world was your oyster and silly things like debt and anxiety were reserved for the “old people.” I recognized friends’ handwriting in the margins of my notes, old girlfriends and study partners (in some cases the same person) who made college fun and boring lectures tolerable.

Those were days I never really want to forget, although they’re already beginning to fade a bit from my memory. Perhaps these prompts will guide you in remembering your college and post-graduate education so your kids and grandkids can compare it to theirs:

1. How did you select the college you attended? What were the most important criteria for you (cost, location, friends, major)?
2. Where did you live during your time in college? What were some of the unique things about the places you lived or stayed?
3. Who were your roommates during college? What made you decide to switch roommates, if you did?
4. What were some of the traditions or special events you remember about your college experience?
5. What about the college campus — what were some of the special characteristics? Did you have a favorite building or location on campus?
6. Have you been back since your graduation? How has the college changed in that time?
7. How well have you kept in touch with friends from college? Why do you think you kept in touch with some people and not with others?
8. Where did you like to study on campus or off campus? Did you prefer a study schedule or cramming (or both)?
9. What were some of your favorite classes in your major? What about elective classes?
10. Did you join a fraternity or sorority? How did you select the one you joined? What are the most poignant memories from that experience?
11. What do you remember about your college graduation?
12. What kind of jobs did you have during college or during your breaks? Did you do anything fun during your college breaks or “study weeks?”
13. Did you and your friends have a favorite “hangout” on or around campus? What was it called, and how or why did you choose it?
14. What advice would you give someone starting college right now that you wish you’d been given (or listened to)?

(If you just spend a paragraph on each of these questions, you’d have about a 10-page chapter on college for your autobiography — cool, huh?)

So I gave her some of her warm milk, I dimmed the lights, and I picked out one of her favorite books to read. We sat on the carpet reading, and I realized I had one other fun trick up my sleeve.

I tuned my iPod to what I have as the “Hospital” playlist — 4 hours of songs we listened to on our cheap little iPod dock during the labor, delivery and recovery at the hospital. I had hastily put it together a few days earlier, but that playlist covered a broad range of music that I wanted her exposed to from the very beginning of her life. Some of the selections include:

• “Waiting for You” by Seal
• “My Father’s Eyes” by Eric Clapton
• “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads
• “My Own Two Hands” by Jack Johnson
• “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young
• “Til Kingdom Come” by Coldplay
• “I’ll Stand by You” by The Pretenders

On occasion I’ll play it while I’m hanging out with my daughter; I like to think it’s soothing to her because somewhere way back in her memory she remembers these songs as part of her from her very beginnings. Some day, when she’s a bit older, I’ll point it out on iTunes and tell her the story of the “Hospital” playlist. She’ll always be able to remember and play those songs she heard when she took her first breaths.

Before the second song of the “Hospital” playlist finished, I gathered up the sleeping heap that was my daughter and took her into her bed. It worked like magic!

My daughter will never know how she felt when she was born — but thanks to a music playlist that will (hopefully) be with her forever, she’ll have a little glimpse into how WE felt when she was born. And that will be special for me.

Do you have any playlists for special occasions? Share them with your loved ones, or write the songs of the collection down and send them on. Perhaps you have a mixed tape someone gave you a long time ago… digitize those songs (you can purchase the songs a la carte on Amazon.com or iTunes) and share those memories with  your friends. Like I mentioned earlier in the week, music has a magical way of transforming us and taking us to another time and place. You’ll enjoy giving your family and friends that trip of a lifetime.

An important element of this hour-long session — along with a short memory and a calloused rump — is the music the instructor chooses. Some of her choices this morning I would have applauded, had my hands not been desperately clenching the handlebars for most of the time. Others did little to inspire me to push myself harder, and instead seemed to whisper in my ear, “Seriously — you’re too old and plump for this.” It was a great reminder of the power of music… how it can affect our mood, motivate us, or help us to vividly recall a time and a place much better than even images or video. In music we often find a way to easily recall not just the details of an event, but the emotion behind it.

This chapter of your personal history may end up being one of the easiest to write — I know it was for me. I could think of countless examples of songs or melodies that helped to make my life what it is today — for better or for worse. That same power that music has, to transport someone to another time and place, is why it will be fun for your children and grandchildren to look back and see what music you enjoyed most. Most likely they’ll be playing it via some surround-sound chip implanted in their head, but the emotion will still be there (assuming we still have emotions in the 22nd Century).

So here are some questions to inspire your thoughts on music for your personal history:

1. What music do you remember your parents enjoying? What, if any, music did your family listen to at home or in the car?
2. How did the musical tastes of your parents or siblings affect what you liked when you were young… and perhaps what you still like in music?
3. What  was the first song or album you purchased? What made you finally buy a piece of music instead of listening to it on the radio or by other means?
4. What was the first concert you went to? Who did you go with, and what do you remember most vividly?
5. What have been some of your favorite concerts you’ve attended through the years? What made them your favorites?
6. How have your musical tastes changed? What “phases,” if any, did you go through as you explored different styles of music?
7. What artists do you consider to be the most groundbreaking in your lifetime and within the types of music you like the most?
8. If you could only listen to one song, artist or album for the rest of your life, what do you think you would choose?
9. How have you changed how you listen to music? Do you now use a MP3 player when you used to listen to cassette tapes on a Walkman, or do you listen to Internet radio stations instead of ones over the “air?”
10. What songs or artists do  you have the most vivid memories about? Were there certain vacations, road trips, or other events in your life that are closely related to certain songs?

I graduated first in my class (well, I think everyone did, but still). I’d love to go back to that school today, because I remember the rooms we had our school in seemed absolutely cavernous at the time.

And I wonder if they’ve fixed that fluorescent light cover yet.

Anyway, for this installment of Memory Monday you’ll find some good prompting questions to spur your own thinking about your first years in school, and how those formative years shaped your interests (and non-interests) later in life:

Did you attend preschool or kindergarten? Where?

What was your teacher’s name and first impressions?

Descibe any “first day of school” rituals your family had.

What were your feelings about the first day of school? What do you remember?

What did you like to do during recess? What games did you play, and who did you play them with?

What was your favorite topic or subject in school? What specific things can you still remember learning in your classes?

What kind of special projects did you do, and what was your topic (animal, state, country)?

What events did you most enjoy participating in, either during of after school? (assemblies, choir, plays, festivals, field day, etc.)

What was your lunch period like? Did you eat in the cafeteria? Was the food served individually, or family style? Did you look forward to certain types of food for lunch?

Who were your best friends at school?

What field trips you do remember taking during elementary school?

My wife and I wandered on the beach, dodging flotsam and jetsam washed ashore from the stormy seas. We watched our wee little daughter haltingly running after “doggies” she sees on the sand, and enjoying our brief moments of peace that come when you have an 18-month-old child.

There are so many ways we can measure & remember her growth — new words, new movements & expressions. New foods she likes (and plenty she hates), new animals she adores — and, finally, some new people she adores too. But we also noticed some things that, even at this young age, she has stopped doing. For instance, for the last several months when she was thirsty she would make a “ha! ha!” sound, as if she were asking her friend to check her breath before meeting some cute boy. She started this before she could really speak words, and we found it to be simply the most charming and endearing thing any child had ever done.

She doesn’t do it anymore — she’s moved on to a much more brusque and demanding, “CUP!” when she’s hungry.

Sometimes you can measure growth and change not by the new things you do, but the things you stop doing.

I’ve stopped finding joy in beating cars next to me off the line at a traffic light (not that my Mazda Protege stood much of a chance anyway).

The thought of a midnight trip to Taco Bell — once a rite of passage — gives me pre-emptive indigestion.

I take as much pleasure from a neatly trimmed and mowed lawn as I used to from a nice, long trip behind a ski boat… and the former doesn’t jerk my shoulder out of its socket, either.

I suppose I realized by watching my daughter on the beach that often our lives aren’t subtraction or addition necessarily — just replacement. Of priorities, of interests and of what makes us most happy.

So when you’re recording your own personal history or that of a loved one, be sure to pay attention not just to the Starts and Beginning To’s, but also the Finishes and Stopped Doing’s. And be sure to capture the cute “ha! ha!” moments before they’re lost to growth & change.

“One bite at a time.”

Our personal histories are the same. When you start to take elements of your life and examine them — and describe them — separately, it makes it easier to put all the pieces together in a cohesive narrative that you’ll enjoy experiencing, and your family will as well.

Although traditionally personal histories have been thought of as written, I’d encourage you to think about how you want your story to be told. Technology now affords us the opportunity to be our own radio producer, author or film director (I already tried that a bit with my slide show, but I plan to experiment with each of these mediums). But however you choose to tell your story, consider it in sections/chapters/acts the help you dissect your life into smaller parts.

To help with this, I’m compiling more than 100 chapter ideas for a personal history — each with at least 10 accompanying questions to prompt thought and provoke insight. The idea isn’t merely to answer these specific questions and call it a personal history, but these prompts should help you start to think about a certain element of your life — to recall anecdotes and emotions that shed light on who you are and what you have become.

For this first installment of Memory Monday (who doesn’t love alliteration?), I put some questions together around what you know of your first days of life — The Earliest Years:

1. What date were you born?
2. How many pounds and inches were you?
3. What city, state and country were you born in?
4. Where were you born — hospital, home, etc.?
5. What have you been told about any unusual circumstances around your birth?
6. What was the weather like on the day you were born? (This is easier than it sounds — try the Farmer’s Almanac weather history site here)
7. How was your name chosen? Does it have particular significance?
8. What did any older siblings think of your arrival?
9. What significant news events occurred on your birthday?

This last paragraph from his article struck a chord with me:

“Don’t believe the marketing hype of the techie types who tell you that newer is always better. Sometimes in technology, as in politics, we regress. This point will be brought home to lots of people when their hard disks crash and they find they’ve lost all of their photos of baby Tiffany forever. Photos of my children, by contrast, are safely stored in the closet in boxes of Kodachrome slides.”

I agree — and disagree with this paragraph. It’s true that sometimes, in technology, we regress. The concert ticket where you went on your first date with your spouse doesn’t quite look the same as a scan on your computer. The crackle of an old LP make evoke many more memories than the melody and accompaniment does.

But are our things REALLY safer in boxes in the closet? Doesn’t the next broken pipe or curious little rodent pose as much a threat — if not more of a threat — to the physical nature of one’s memories? I think so.

There is a nice middle ground that I think offers a perfect combination of the portability & flexibility of digital things with the permanence and tangibility (is that a word?) of physical pictures, souvenirs, etc.

The techies call it “The Cloud.”

You’ve probably heard the commercials from Microsoft touting the beauty of “the cloud.” With all your content stored digitally on redundant servers across the world, your “digital stuff” isn’t just available to you anywhere, at any time, when you’re connected to the Internet — but it offers the ability to store multiple backups of data in different physical locations to prevent the loss of that information.

It’s the same idea as the “seed banks” stored all over the world in case the world almost comes to an end and we could really go for some cilantro.

How does this apply to you? Good question.

Digitize, store and share your memories with those who they mean the most to.

Don’t throw anything away if you don’t want to. Just copy it all via scanning or using digitizing services for video or other mediums. And then distribute it to others who may love to share those memories with you.

Not only are you building those connections with others by rekindling old memories that made you so close, but you’re planting copies of your digital memories all over the place, in case something happens to your physical copies.

Have some old photos of the family road trip when you were 12 and your brother threw up out the window and painted the rest of the station wagon a fluorescent green until the next rest stop? Scan them and send them off to your brother with a note: “I can still smell you.” Voila! You’ve sent your memories “to the cloud,” and you’ve reminded your brother that he’s still the one in the family with the weak stomach.

Technology and “the digital revolution” doesn’t have to scare us about the future of our “stuff,” our memories. It offers loads of opportunity to not only keep those memories safe, but keep our most cherished relationships close.

And yet, obviously, to his family, his life was an extraordinary one. Extraordinary because of its proximity and meaning to them. It was a tremendous reminder to me of a few critical truths:

• Our lives are important to those closest to us — regardless of their peaks or valleys, their grand accomplishments or rather typical patterns
• A life well-lived by a very good man, IS an extraordinary life
• We usually only know one side of a person — I was amazed to learn so much more about this man at his life celebration than I’d ever imagined, and heard from people whose lives he touched that I had no idea about
• Everyone leaves a legacy — whether we shape it and sculpt it, or allow others to, is up to us.

What are the green bananas in your house? Besides actual green bananas, of course.

A few years ago, I was talking to an older colleague to see how he was doing — he had experienced some health problems in the last few years. His response was: “Well, let’s just say I don’t buy green bananas anymore.” The man had a great, if somewhat dark, sense of humor.

I’ve since thought about “green bananas” in a lot of different contexts. It comes to mind with many things that have a deceptively short shelf life, things that appear not yet ready to take action on but will actually soon lose a lot of their value (unless you’re interested in making banana bread).

And lately, I’ve realized that we’ve all probably got a lot of stuff on our bookshelves and in our garages that I’d put in the “green banana” category — BOOKS.

Why books?

Look no further than today’s news about Borders filing for bankruptcy and closing hundreds of stores.

Or to the news that probably the country’s best independent bookstore laid off 31 employees last week.

Or that Amazon sold 115 Kindle book versions for every 100 paper books they sold this year.

I’m not saying that paper books are going to be gone tomorrow… but you may want to think about getting them off your shelf or out of that box in the garage and onto/into someone else’s… for a few reasons:

• I’ve found that I rarely, if ever, read a book more than once. Sure, there are a few books like “Where the Red Fern Grows” (still makes me a bit misty-eyed) or Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” that I can’t imagine getting rid of, but for the most part I read a book and I’m done with it for good. So  why do I let it take up space and, possibly, money, in my house?
• Even if you can continue to sell books in the coming years without a problem, it’s clear that the demand for this medium is diminishing — the adoption rate for e-readers, iPads, smartphones and other devices for reading books electronically is far outpacing any overall demand growth for book content… which means that fewer and fewer people will be looking for the paper versions of books.
• There are fewer and fewer physical bookstores where you can sell your books at all. Amazon enjoys a 20%+ share of the US market for books… and that’s a crowded marketplace where you’re competing nationally for the attention of the diminishing crowd of paper book buyers. It’s difficult  to turn your past book purchases into real cash that way, when someone’s usually willing to undercut your price in Amazon’s busy marketplace.

For these reasons, I bit the bullet last week and took three banana boxes (I know, the coincidence here is amazing) of old books to the NW warehouse of Powell’s Bookstores here in Portland. I had two reasons — to get a little bit of cash back for all the books I had sitting around in my garage, and to clear out some room in the garage so I could actually, comfortably park my car in there.

Powell’s had a great system; I wandered around with my daughter while one of the staff members logged my books and told me which ones they’d buy back from me. The books they wouldn’t buy from me I could either take back home, or they would donate to Better World Books, a site that uses revenue from book sales to support literacy programs. I could either take my $50 in cash, or they could give me a $75 credit at Powell’s. As tempting as the credit was (and if you’ve been to Powell’s City of Books you know what kind of temptation that can be), I pulled a Steve Miller and took the money and ran (OK, waddled with my daughter clinging to my pinkie) out of the warehouse. A great, quality experience in book-selling that netted me cash and that cleared two boxes out of my garage.

I also believe it’s one experience that will be less and less prevalent in the coming years.

Great bookstores like Powell’s will probably always be around… but they may not always be buying books back, or at least at the prices they are today. Perhaps the dynamics of supply and demand are different in your local community, but by and large there will be more sales headed to my (insert spiffy electronics device trademarked name) than to my bookshelf.

So NOW is the time! Here are a few easy steps to follow:

• Sort through your books. Most places don’t take old textbooks, and you may find a sprinkling of personal books in your stash that they wouldn’t have interest in (thankfully they let me take home the two high school yearbooks I’d left in the boxes — oops!) You may also want to separate any particularly old or rare books that you’d want to take to a specialty bookseller for rare books. And if it’s an original of the Audubon book described here, give me a call first. <wink> <wink>
• Write down the titles of the books you’re selling. No, this isn’t for the IRS — it’s for your personal history. I wrote down the books I sold — actually all  the books in the boxes I took to sell — because I believe that a history of  the books we read may be as interesting or important to our kids as anything else we pass down to them. Imagine being able to open up a copy of the same book your grandfather read 60 years earlier, perhaps to read his perspective on the story or what he learned from it that shaped his life? THAT is the type of actionable, interesting history that your kids and grandkids will crave in the future.
• Find a local bookseller if possible. As I mentioned before, most of the nationwide sites will be filled with desperate individuals trying to offload books at any price possible; your best bet to get a decent price back for your books is to find someone local who will buy them, preferably in bulk. I’m lucky to have a great place like the Powell’s warehouse in my area, but you may have something similar where you live so do some research. You also avoid the shipping hassles that you’ll find and have to manage on many online sites, which sometimes makes it seem like selling your books is a net loss when your time is factored in. NOTE: go to a central storage facility to sell them, if there is one for the bookstore chain you’re selling to; most stores only buy for the location they’re at, which limits the number of books you may be able to sell. If they aren’t as awesome as Powell’s and don’t have a central facility, then consider going to the largest location in your area so you have the best chance of selling back all or most of your books.
• Spend your money on developing your own personal history. I had an extra $50 that I spent on some clear plastic boxes to organize my “stuff” better and label it to clear space in my house. This is going to help me better sort through all my memories and develop them into a cohesive, interesting story that my kids and grandkids will want to read, watch or whatever Jetson-type thing they’ll do in the future.

If you just love books and want to assemble one of those Ivy League-type-looking libraries with the cool rolling ladders on rails, then follow your dreams and disregard this post; for everyone else, you may want to think of how the winds of change are making items in your house less and less valuable by the day. Just make sure you consider the books you read part of your personal history, and care enough to share them with your progeny.