Photos Keep Memories Alive

We’d just finished visiting Grandpa Bill at his assisted living community in Dallas. Becca and I walked out to the parking lot, and there was a small stack of printed photos tucked under the windshield wiper of our car. Nature shots. Flowers. A sunset. A close-up of a dog. Street art. On top of them, a handwritten note on purple paper.

“Photos keep memories alive!”

No name. No explanation. Just the photos and the note from a stranger.

I didn’t know what to make of it at first. But the timing was hard to ignore. Because we’d just spent the last couple hours doing exactly that. Using photos to bring memories alive for a man who’s lived a hundred years of them.

Meet Grandpa Bill

Grandpa Bill just turned 101! To call him Grandpa might be a stretch since there’s no blood relation. He’s Becca’s birth mom’s sister’s husband’s father. But he’s just Grandpa Bill. Or as the family calls him, Grandpa the Great.

The nickname fits. He flew for Braniff International Airways. Flew all over the world, including routes down to South America. After he retired, he kept going. Downhill skiing. Road cycling. Riding his motorcycle. He was in his early to mid-90s when he finally slowed down. And even that wasn’t exactly by choice. He had a bad accident on his bicycle when he was around 94. He was out riding by himself. That pretty much ended both the cycling and the motorcycle riding.

I can remember one of his birthday parties at his son Bob’s house in Dallas. I think he was turning 90. There was a huge inflatable water slide set up for the “kids”. Apparently, Grandpa Bill and I are kids as we were the only adults to take the ride.

His motorized wheelchair has gotten him in trouble a few times for going too fast down the hallways of his assisted living facility. We joked that they should set up a racetrack outside so he could actually race people. He was all for it!

He’s also a man of deep faith. And I think that faith has been critical to his sense of purpose. It doesn’t have to be religious faith. It can be any kind of recognition that there’s something out there bigger than us. But whatever it is for Grandpa Bill, it has rippled down through his entire family. You can feel it.

That’s who he is.

The Photos

We had lunch together and sat and talked for a while. At one point, Becca and I mentioned AI. We told him that some people are saying the technological progress over the next ten years could equal what we’ve experienced over the last hundred. His entire lifetime!

Think about it, when he was born in 1924, cars weren’t even widespread.

We asked if he wanted to have a little fun with AI. He said sure.

I took a photo of him in his wheelchair. Then I ran it through an AI image generator. The first one put him in the cockpit of a plane. He liked that.

The second one put him riding a Braniff 747, sitting on top of the plane like it was a horse. He got a chuckle out of that.

Then while Becca was helping him with some tax stuff on the computer, I got an idea. I used to have a Harley-Davidson. Sold it because riding motorcycles just got too dangerous for me with all the distracted drivers out there. But love of motorcycles is something Grandpa Bill and I share.

So, I put us on a motorcycle together. Me driving, him on the back. Riding down 75 with the Dallas skyline behind us.

Grandpa Bill was over at the computer with Becca. He heard me chuckling. “What are you laughing at over there?”

I showed him.

His smile went ear to ear. You could see it brought him back to those days when he could ride free. He said, “Send that to my daughter.”

She thought it was real at first. Because it looks real. Which is its own lesson. AI can put a huge smile on a 100-year-old man’s face by giving him back a feeling he hasn’t had in years. It can also create massive deception. Both things are true. The same tool that made Grandpa Bill light up could fool his own daughter into thinking something happened that didn’t.

I want to be clear. These are not real photos. They were generated by AI. But the smile was real. The feeling was real.

What We Miss

Here’s what I keep thinking about. In our culture, we tend to look at people as they get older and focus on what they can’t do anymore. They can’t work. They can’t drive. They can’t contribute the way they used to. We build a whole frame around loss.

But what about what they can do? What about what they’ve already done? A hundred years of lived experience. That’s not nothing. That’s wisdom I certainly don’t have.

We’ve gotten away from ancestral wisdom in this country. The kind that comes from sitting with your grandparents and your great-grandparents. Asking them questions. Listening to what they’ve learned over the arc of a whole life.

I soak up every minute I can get with Grandpa Bill. I’m trying to do the same with my parents, my aunts and uncles. Because what they’ve experienced over the trajectory of a lifetime has lessons in it. If you ask the questions. If you actually listen.

And maybe we should sit with the idea that it’s not always them who don’t get it. Maybe sometimes we’re the ones who don’t get it.

The Note

When we walked out to that parking lot after the visit and found those photos on our car, I just stood there for a second. A stranger had left a stack of printed pictures, nature and flowers and art, with a handwritten note. Photos keep memories alive.

We’d just spent the afternoon doing exactly that. Using pictures, ones that didn’t even exist an hour earlier, to bring a man back to the cockpit and back to his motorcycle. To bring back a feeling.

One set of photos was made by a machine. The other was left by a human hand. Both were about the same thing. Keeping something alive that matters.

I don’t know who left those photos on our car. I don’t know if they saw us walk in or if they just leave photos on random cars in parking lots as their own little act of kindness. I don’t know their story.

But I do know the timing was something I won’t forget. I know that I will put the pictures on someone else’s car to play the love forward. And, I know that Grandpa Bill, somewhere in that building behind us, was still smiling.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.