Photographs: Then & Now

A needle in a haystack.  One in a million.  The perfect storm.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she has to walk into mine.  What are the odds that before you die, you'll hold in your hand that one perfect photograph that triggers the perfect rush of sentimental memories that last a lifetime?  Luckily I beat those odds and I have one of those photos.  If you own a digital camera, you probably do too.

For those of us who are parents, we are lucky enough to live two lifetimes.  We have our own memories as children, and then we live through our own children's memories.  I have few precious photographs from my childhood, no film footage at all, and as for video technology, well that hadn't been invented yet.  I miss my childhood.  I remember being happy, but I yearn  for photographs that will transport me back in time.  Every once in a while, I crave for visual evidential reminders of how happy I was back then.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns, ours didn't have any digital cameras.

Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook and Flickr, our digital images populate and repopulate the worlds of our families, our friends and our acquaintances.  Our personal libraries of digital photographs overflow.  And this worries me.  In a world of abundance, things lose value.  Although we have become a society immersed in digital images, let us remember that these digital memories are not a cheap commodity. 

I am not a professional photographer, and my camera is old and outdated; but it is digital and that makes all the difference in the world.  The laws of mathematics are quite wonderful, and odds are if you take enough photographs, the likelihood is that you too will eventually have hanging on your wall that one shot, that one moment in time, that represents all that is good and right in your world.  As parents from the baby boom generation living in this modern digital world, how lucky are we to be given a second chance.  Cherish these swelling numbers of photographs sitting on your hard drives, and don't take them for granted.

Dickens: Then & Now

I have fond memories of Sunday afternoons in the 1960's.  One day a week I had the television all to myself for a few good hours while mom cooked Sunday dinner.  Dad rarely watched TV except for the Lawrence Welk Show on Saturday nights.  My five siblings simply didn't like the fact that we had only one channel to watch, and Sunday afternoons were reruns of classic movies based on the novels of Charles Dickens.  Great Expectations was always my favorite.

One couch, one easy-chair, one TV and me.  The television screen was tiny, trivial is size, and the picture was snowy.  We say "snowy" but it's not because I was watching A Christmas Carol.  A snowy picture meant that the video signal was weak or disrupted by changes in the weather.  Such inconsistencies created wrestling matches between the gray-scaled Pip and the pulsating cloud of interference on the TV screen.  I was destined to leave the comfort of my chair to play referee by jiggling the antenna and flip-flopping the bunny ears.  With enough technique and determination, Miss Havisham's wrinkled face would become distinguishable and Estella's arrogant voice could be heard once the static in the sound diminished to a trickle.

I loved those movies and I loved those afternoons.  Nowadays, I have the entire collection of Dickens novels available on my Kindle, and my subscription to Netflix allows me instant gratification when I'm in the mood for a BBC classic on any afternoon of my choosing.  And yet, I think I appreciated Dickens more when I had to work for that pleasure.  In the 1960's, when the Ghost of Christmas Present said, "Come and get to know me better," I did so by moving off my chair to fix the reception so I could get to know him better.