For years, I kept my paper mementos, school award certificates, playbills, the odd wedding napkin, in self-adhesive photo albums. Do you remember the kind? A sheet of cardboard coated in glue, a plastic sheet you press down over the top, and a promise that your keepsakes will stay put forever.
They kept that promise. That was the problem.
Sticky Situations
A couple of years ago, I went looking for a few particular mementos and discovered that pulling them free was less a retrieval mission and more a hostage negotiation. Decades in the album had made the adhesive tackier, not looser, and the plastic covers had gone brittle enough to shred the moment I lifted them off the page. I ended up standing at the kitchen counter with a hair dryer, coaxing thirty-year-old glue into letting go of paper it had clearly decided was staying put.
That was the end of self-adhesive albums for me. These Dunwell Presentation Binders hold everything now, sixty pockets, no glue, nothing to shred. I have not looked back, except to go rescue a few more mementos with the hair dryer.
Menus and Memories
So what happened to the paper that skipped the photo albums entirely? Since 2006, I’ve been collecting the menus from Mark’s and my special dinners. They had a system of their own: a stack, a rubber band, and a general aspiration toward chronological order that mostly held, but not entirely.
Now they live in the presentation binders, properly filed, and flipping through them does what a rubber band never could. Every menu is a place we’ve been and a dinner we still talk about.
Gold Stars for Great Meals
For the ones that earned more than a mention, the Michelin star restaurants, I found a bag of gold star foil confetti to mark the pages. It sounds like a small thing. But flip past a page and hit a scatter of gold stars, and you know immediately: this one was special.
