Marriage Moats-Say Cheese!
Published: Thu, 05/05/11
| Marriage Moats | Caring for Marriage |
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"Say cheese!!!"
This memory is captured forever, or at least until the hard drive crashes with no back up.
It is a sweet moment for a little girl and her father, taking pictures of each other. There are many snapshots, strung together into a day, a week, that we call a lifetime. Some are fuzzy with mixed feelings. Others are sharp and popping with energy.
It is interesting how the captured image compares to the cold facts. They say that non digital photos will fade. I have noticed that some memories actually get brighter in time.
One time John and I were camping with friends and our three small kidlets. It was New Year's Eve, and we toasted at midnight, just as a soft rain chased us into our tent. After an hour, what began as a sprinkle graduated to a torrential downpour, flooding the floor of our refuge. John bailed in the wee hours and went to sleep in the car. I thought him a wimp, until I realized I was completely soaked and cold. Then I decided he was brilliant. The baby snoozing in the carseat never experienced any inconvenience, and the two year old on a foam pad never weighed it down enough to get wet either. Hence it was mostly a rough experience for the grown ups, who were more than the usual shade of groggy for the dawning of the new year.
Yet our memory of that story, which we pull out annually, is framed with laughter and knee slapping. It has softened with time, and the seven hours of inconvenience have fueled twenty five years of shared remembrance.
Then there was the time I decided to help the kids put together a Christmas package for a low income family. We wrapped gifts, made cookies, and put it all in a huge basket. My take is that the kids were only barely involved, despite my efforts to engage them. It was dicey trying to find the apartment of total strangers, whose scant address we were given through Ben's social services agency. We arrived, not quite knowing what to say, especially considering the language barrier, so we set things on the floor, smiled and left. It did not seem like the peak experience I was hoping for.
But for years, the kids would mention it as if it were a core part of their childhood.
"Remember how we used to bring Christmas presents to needy families every year? It was so much fun!" Really?
I have no need to recheck the negatives.1. Their memory is what I want to keep.
1. In the last century, photographs were taken from film images called negatives, which actually existed apart from computers or the cloud. Photo by Andy Sullivan
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