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The Unscanner
6 May 2024
Emptying a house is an overwhelming task. We've put in well over 500 hours at Mom's house after her death trying to distribute the contents. Every time we open a closet door or a desk drawer or a box in storage, we find some new treasure.
The other day we opened a closet in the laundry room only to discover a box on the top shelf Mom had packed after her own mother had passed away. Inside were framed photos and a few knickknacks and one old baptismal certificate.
We unfurled the certificate. It was our godfather's. And he is still alive.
So we thought we'd email him an image of it to see if he wanted it. We've been doing that as we found something we suspected would be appreciated. And it is always appreciated.
We put the ancient scroll in Mom's HP Envy to scan it but the scan was pretty bad. Not only did the lightweight cover not flatten the document but the quality of the scan using HP's software was terrible. Overexposed, it lost all the detail.
Well, we could do better at home, we thought.
Except, wait a minute. Why not use the unscanner we've been using to text images of other treasures to the people who would appreciate them?
The unscanner, of course, is our iPhone.
We found a suitable spot lit by the sunlight and lined up the shot with the pertinent details in the foreground and let the color illustration (not easily accomplished in 1937) roll off in the background.
We emailed it to him later that day. And he responded a day later.
"I am going to keep a copy of this to take with me as a ticket to where ever I will be going," he wrote.
Ah, Godfather, you must have forgotten the old truism, "You can't take it with you."