Picture This

    My grandparents went on a short vacation to Buffalo, NY in about 1920.  Though they had been married 3 or so years earlier, I'm sure they went the few miles to Niagra Falls while they were there. While in Buffalo they found a Kodak 3A bellows camera that had been forgotten on a park bench. It was quite the find.  In those days that camera cost $20.  A week's salary.  It became the family camera. It took marvelous pictures. It had infinite focus.  I guess a kind of primitive, reflex lens.  Every find implies a loss. Lately, I've thought about that.
    There were hundreds of photos, each with a sweet story.  My parents had a Brownie Hawkeye and I had both an Instamatic and a Polaroid.  None as good as that old Kodak and none of them as good as the camera on my cell phone or yours.  The stories are every bit as sweet.  The message ignores the medium.
    A century of holidays, vacations, graduations, reunions, departures, arrivals, sunny days and winter storms. Decade after decade of family lore and old friends, all in albums and shoeboxes. They would be brought out every year or so and pondered again and the oral history would be repeated and to some degree re-lived.  Children's questions answered and the answers propelled into the future.
    Well, I put a stop to that shit. I lost all those pictures. They only exist in my aging memory which most certainly could be absent-mindedly left on a park bench.
    When video cameras were first available I refused to buy one. Looking at smiling wives throwing bouquets and baby's first steps, old Christmas trees just made me think, 'How depressing would that be if something went wrong?'
    The static quality of a moment frozen in time is much better to me than a living and breathing video.  I think it's better my memories are only captured just so much and imperfectly. I could not bear the smiles or frowns or tears of a departed loved one. My imperfect memories are just perfect enough.  To me.
    Still, I return to the regret of the loss of those old photos a couple times a week. For example, I'm writing about it now.  I berate myself for carelessness.  Pfft, yeah, who doesn't?