My Fish Story
One picture
There’s this one special picture I have of myself, my mother, and one of my brothers watching my grandfather Tom pretending to eat a live fish. I’m probably 6–7 years old, he’d be about 60. I’m guessing. He was really a man of few words, but intensely funny in his own quiet ways. He passed away five years ago. He is deeply missed by his whole giant family. In the picture, we’re sitting on a wooden dock attached to a short pier in the Bass River that cuts through West Dennis down the Cape.
We called the area the “town dock” growing up. I have no idea the real name, I don’t think it even has one. It’s a rickety old thing at the end of a sandy cul-de-sac on this little spit of land where locals go just to launch their boats. There is a beach that’s about 3 feet wide by 10 feet long. It kind of smells like motor oil and low tide. Its COVERED in eelgrass and seaweed and armies of fiddler crabs. Glamorous New Englandy stuff. We used to walk to the dock from my grandparents’ Victorian house on Church St. about a half mile away. A house that was a giant ancient sea captain’s house filled with secret passages and hidden dangers.
The picture was taken after a morning of fishing. I don’t know if it’s the first time we ever went fishing, but it’s got to be pretty close. We caught a scup. I think we actually might have caught a few.
My grandfather thought it would be funny to pretend to eat the fish right there on the dock. I think I must have thought it was pretty funny at the time too (although I don’t look it). I can almost remember him laughing, or at least I think I can.
By most accounts this was a pretty unremarkable moment on a pretty unremarkable day. If I didn’t have the photo, I’m sure I wouldn’t have remembered a thing.
I’ve kept this photo (one way or another) for a long long time because in this one special picture is a flood of memories and stories and emotions about a time and place that now feels really quite far away. It’s all the nostalgia I have for a 1980s early childhood, the old Cape in the summer, and my relationship with my grandfather and family rolled into one salient emotional moment.
Memory makers
Fast forward to today. The quality and amount of pictures we are able to take with our phones is intimidating. It’s really hard to imagine that just 15 years ago most of us would buy an expensive uni-tasker picture machine, spend more money on limiting physical film, and then drive to a place to pay even more money for a stranger to develop our pictures over the course of a week. It seems clear those experiences caused us all to self-curate our memory making activities because there was an obvious and real economic constraint. Hence my one special picture and countless other family photo albums handed down over time.
These days, my wife and I have been fortunate enough to start building a family of our own. And with it, an accelerating mountain of contextless photos of the small cave troll who shares our house with us. But with thousands and thousands of photos, it feels like something is still being lost.
We scroll through our pictures to see how our son has changed, but rarely do anything more. I’m relying on my own memory to capture and preserve the stories that are important to me and my family, and the photographs to act as an, often unreliable, trigger.
We never followed through on that baby book, or the photobooks, or the journaling. Or I hear from my mom (for the past 10 years) “I just need to sit down and learn how to make a…” but that day rarely seems to come. It’s just too much time and energy to heap on top of already busy days.
And it’s not just families with children. The same can be said for all the trips and adventures we’ve been fortunate to go on, or the origin stories of my parents and grandparents. We’re losing a lot of what makes each our and our family’s and community’s stories meaningful and unique. We’re settling for the saccharine sanitized Snapchat version of our lives instead of the meaningful personal Storycorps version important to the ones we really care about.
We can do better. I want my own children to know more about their own lives and the lives of their parents and grandparents as they grow up. But it’s not going to happen on its own, and the problem is only getting worse. To make progress, folks are going to need help making sense of and capturing all the details of the memories they’re generating.
So that’s what we’re focused on here — on making people better memory makers. We want to help regular folks preserve the special-to-them details of their most meaningful experiences in an easy interesting way so their stories can go on for themselves and their families.
So what’s next for Mylestone?
We’re extremely excited for the next evolution of mylestone. In the coming months we’re going to be working on creating and shipping a few big experiences to help people make better memories:
- A service that “mines” your mountains of old pictures and automatically finds good ones to surprise you with. Think Timehop but with a little more soul and purpose.
- A service that asks you questions about those surprise photos to bring out the real stories hiding in your head. Think old friends swapping stories around the table (except this one is a robot on your phone).
- A service that mashes your words and photos together into a special keepsakable book/card/picture that we send you automatically as you use the service. No scary sitting down to “be creative” time, we do the work.
At the same time, we’ve made some structural changes to help us focus hard on those builds:
We are well aware of how hard it is to build a consumer business and that we need to be super focused on getting to a scalable product folks absolutely love to use. To push harder on getting to that lovable consumer product sooner, Dave Balter has stepped away from his role as CEO and will be continuing on in as a board member, and I’ve taken over day-to-day operations of mylestone. We agree that the company really needs to be focused on consumer + product design to win, and those are things I’ve spent much of my career deeply focused on.
I’m insanely excited to hone and improve our product in this next stage, as well as to continue to have Dave involved in the business in a way that can best help us succeed. I can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on and to deliver our customers an amazing product to help them make progress on controlling and celebrating the stories of their lives. Now, let’s go make some new memories!
Interested in trying out an early version of the new mylestone? Sign up to be part of our early access beta at mylestone.com
