Scattered Pictures

I am equipped to take a picture of anything at any time. I used to rely on my photographic memory, but now I have a little thing called a cell phone. This means I can drink more, remember less and be reminded later of all things that are probably best forgotten. I can also document any wrong-doing, compare strange babies and see the inside of my pocket at random intervals throughout the day. I can snap indiscretions. I can capture joy. I can take pictures of my breakfast. I remember when cameras were special. Back in the day when they were huge and heavy and you had to put film in them and once you closed the back you didn't dare open it again till all the pictures were taken. People who had cameras were good at taking pictures. It was their craft. Others respected it because camera people had special powers. They could make a bulky box with a roll of plastic in it freeze a moment and preserve a memory. They knew how to frame it up, not to face the sun, whether or not to use a flash, how to hold 'er steady and just the right moment to press (and hold) the button. The results were crisp and seemingly real. The smiles fresh, the colors like fruit you could almost taste. A picture was a special thing. You'd wait a few days for it. And it always came with 11 or 23 or 35 others you could flip through, careful not to get fingerprints on the faces. Sometimes the pictures would be a mix across several months because you just didn't take pictures that often. You took four or five at confirmation, then your family went to Albuquerque and then you graduated. All on one roll. You'd pick out the three best ones and find good frames for them. You'd take your time undoing the frames, pulling out the fake pictures of a fake family celebrating fake times so you could make it real. Then you'd hang one on your dorm room wall (following strict regulations regarding holes vs. double-sided mounting tape) and prop one up on a shelf and tuck one in the corner of your loft and voila! You've got pictures. The ones without frames would get tacked to a bulletin board or pressed into an album or left loose in a drawer. Now my unframed photos are in my cell phone, on my hard drive and littered across cyberspace. I've gone through at least three digital cameras since they were introduced and all of them have literally hundreds of pictures hanging out inside them that I haven't looked at in years. I have folders upon folders of pictures on my laptop as well as on my iMac as well as on my 360G external flash drive. I have pictures I took with a set of digital binoculars at a Tiger game. 57 pictures of Tigers at bat, Tigers in the field, the umpire's butt (heh-heh), the scoreboard (it was 2-0 in the 3rd), what the hell am I gonna do with them? Well, I'll tell you what I'm not gonna do with 'em. Delete. Those pictures are just like the ones in the drawer. You never throw them out. You don't know why. But you gotta hang onto them. Even the bad ones. I should take a lesson from my Dad. He started scanning all the family photos a few years ago and now he has them all saved and organized by the instant they were captured on film. He even identified people in the pics (I think he made up some names). But I'm too lazy and I don't have nearly the breadth of photos he has. And mine lack historical significance. Unless you think a drive-by shot of the hotdog statue in front of that hotdog place on the Cape means something. He was putting ketchup on his own head! I guess I think the camera is kind of taken for granted nowadays. If you wanted to, you could take a picture of every second of your life and skip journaling altogether. (Please don't do that.) A picture is worth 1000 words, they say. I guess they haven't seen the inside of my pocket.