A couple years ago, Kodak ran what I consider to be a brilliant advertisement. A group of children walk in what looked to be a museum with stark white walls. On the walls are scores of photographs, some of them iconic images for Americas - the first flight at Kitty Hawk, Muhammad Ali with his arm raised in victory, 1980's Miracle on Ice, Martin Luther King, Jr. standing before an uncountable crowd. Others are more mundane - baby in a sunhat, a bride and groom in wedding finery, a couple hugging and mugging for the camera. The docent asks the children if they can hear what the photographs are saying. "They're saying Keep me," he tells them, "Share me, protect me...and I will live forever." Nearby, a man stares in teary reverence at a decades-old picture of a young woman in a blue dress.

It was genius, this way of reminding us that even though we now take pictures with our phones and our PDAs and goodness knows what else, that these images still require protection if we value them, if we want these bits of digital ephemera to live on as our boxes of old film-based photographs do...that even though we have moved beyond the box of unlabled and yet still precious pics under the bed, there is much still to keep and share.

I have a file on the computer on which I type this named 0000432Xy7.jpg. It is a picture of Entropy Girl in her first hour of life, nearly three years ago, wrapped in a pink and white plaid blanket and staring directly into her father's face. For all it's importance to me, I clearly have not done enough to act on how this picture makes me feel. There are no back-ups, no duplicates and it has never been printed for display in my home.

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Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur (and not just when the Boy Wonder asks if it's "hard to be [my] age"). I am becoming wary of what each technological advance trumpted as the Next Cool Thing will cost us. When every house on every block has it's own 108-inch television, will we bother to gather together to watch movies when watching one on such a screen is already like being with a crowd (except for the pesky interpersonal interaction part)? Students are no longer expected to learn cursive writing in some school districts, a casualty of our typing and texting age. I think this is sad, and not only because many students actually find cursive easier to learn first than printing, especially visual-learners whose tendancy toward the drawing and art make the flowing lettering more appealing, but also because losing longhand-based literacy cuts people off from entire centuries of human expression.

And, of course, we no longer need to know how to cook. But you know how I feel about that.

I fear that we're not protecting the things we find valuable, let alone sharing them. In our rush to trade up our Lion King VHS tapes to DVD to Blu-ray we're left behind, just more of the masses who will either become irrelevent or clamor to catch up. But we're losing more than the occasional hand-written letter (how will anyone ever right a biography of my life when I've had more than a score of e-mail addresses and the use of goodness knows how many servers? Can you imagine if Thomas Jefferson had access to Blogger?), but we're also losing perspective with the rush to upgrade and add more.

I wonder what my children will think is worth sharing and protecting from their childhood. Will it be a .WAV file of Entropy Girl singing "Feliz Navidad" with the words coming out something more like "May-lease Mah-bee-dah"? Or the songs that we sing together whenever we're in the car? Will anything be able to play such files in 50 or 60 years? (Hint: my dad has a box load of 8-track tapes in his basement, unplayed since I was about nine years old.)

I wonder what meals they'll remember most as they grow. Will it be the pierogie we make together, talking about their Polish great-grandmother and the first time I met her (when she complimented my generous figure as being "good for having babies" - turns out she was right, although I didn't love hearing it at the time). I can't believe that they'll look back and remember the hot dogs, mac-and-cheese or frozen ravioli.
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Or at least I don't want to believe that they will. Yes, I must do a better job of protecting and sharing, not just our photographs, but our history - familial and otherwise. Not doing so is the same as throwing it out with the arrival of the Next Cool Thing.