I'm sitting on your photo.
In junior high school the plastic slots for photos were very useful. Back then,
well before MySpace and Facebook made us friends with more people than we knew
how to count, we exchanged photos with the girls (or boys) with whom we were involved,
and having their photos in our wallets established a relationship; having their
photo in your wallet meant something - though I really don't remember just what
that was anymore.
I don't have photos of my family in my wallet. I could perhaps keep them on my
cellphone, but I'm not sure why I would. When Eitan recently got a cellphone he
photographed our dog and used that photo as his screensaver on the phone. I somehow
doubt whether, if and when he'll have his first girlfriend, he'll replace the
dog's photo with hers.
I doubt that having a photo of someone close to us in our wallets makes us think
about them - until we see that picture when we take out our credit cards and remember
for whom we're wasting our money. Being someone who rarely has the opportunity
to visit executives in board rooms, I don't know if, as we've come to expect from
films, they keep framed pictures of their families on their desks. If they do,
it's my guess that they do so not in order to think about them during the day,
but to create the impression that they're the sort of people with whom we can
enter an honest business transaction.
Go to: Do people still do that?, or
Go to: Necessity is the mother ..., or
Go to: To hold in our hands.