Last May, my children discovered my photo-album from college. As they laughed at images of me in my early twenties wearing big twist outs and patterned head wraps, or of their dad with his tight fade and tighter shirts, I realized how unfamiliar to them this intimate object of mine was. For me, each plastic-covered page revealed one or more carefully curated stories from my young adulthood. In contrast, my daughter, who was born in 2012, and my son, born in 2015, saw the album quite differently. For them, it was a random assortment of images and an artifact that offered a glimpse into their parents’ yesteryear.
But that experience was also a rite of passage. As they visited my early adulthood, I flashbacked to my own poring over of my parents’ albums when I was a child in the 1980s. Unbeknownst to me at that time, I was, in fact, participating in
