I'm 41 and I still can't throw away the shoebox of photos from 1987, and last night I figured out why, it's the only proof I have that some afternoons happened at all because nobody was documenting anything for anyone but themselves

I'm 41 and I still can't throw away the shoebox of photos from 1987, and last night I figured out why, it's the only proof I have that some afternoons happened at all because nobody was documenting anything for anyone but themselves

The shoebox lives on the top shelf of the closet in our second bedroom, behind a stack of tax returns I’ve been meaning to shred since the Obama administration. It’s a Reebok box, white and blue, the cardboard soft at the corners from being opened and closed for thirty-eight years. Inside are roughly four hundred photographs from 1987, the year I turned three. My wife asked me last weekend, with the careful neutrality immigration lawyers develop…