Glories of Technology

A Moment of Recognition

A Moment of Recognition. DON’T TOUCH THE FLOWERS! Is that simple enough, even for kids?

Hard to resist Luddite emotions. The Jersey motorhead who’s frightened of all the texting teenage drivers. Disgust at all the Facebook kids who photograph themselves doing anything and everything. Life is NOT photographs of you being pleased with yourself. But I have to keep myself honest. Every once in a while, the new technology works.

When do you ever get to see the love of your life the way she must have been when she was just a tadpole? I mean, you glimpse it now and again in children and grandchildren. Evanescent. Glimmering. But if you have a picture you take and then discover is special, and you go back to it because it reminds you of the extraordinary course of her life, which finally delivers her to YOU, then that’s pure gold.

We saw this little girl at Longwood Gardens. She was a handful, to her parents and everyone else. But beautiful. My wife would have been exactly like her at that age. WAS, at that age. I’ve heard the stories.

The ubiquity of the iPhone can be a sort of time machine. All those random snaps we take can be both past and future. That’s the promise and the peril.

We’re playing with time now. I hope we’re up to it.

5 thoughts on “Glories of Technology

  1. That’s a new feature in the coming iPhone Sigma — time-travel view, where you can scan the past and smile at the precocious Mrs. as she was learning all her ways for the first time!

    Fantastic shot, I hope you show the parents.

    Sidenote: Longwood Gardens, what a place! I’ll have to bring the fam out there once we return to PA for a visit.

  2. This is another in a long line of things I had been thinking about that were suddenly and randomly posts here or at the other site. Funny how that happens so often here.

    I am not sure how I feel about the technology. I have so many digital pictures on my hard drive that I rarely look at them and gave up on trying to organize them long ago. But one day, I found a box of old, real pictures in my parents’ garage that had been there since I moved out. They were a chronological jumble of things from baby pictures, elementary school, and beyond. I was mesmerized and didn’t stop pawing through them until I had seen every single one.

    Maybe one day my kids will get a kick out of trolling through the mess of pics in a computer folder, assuming the digital files survive that long. But they’ll probably never know how it feels for your hands to find one very special picture you thought had been lost forever, turn it over and discover a note on the back you never knew was there.

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