I really like digital cameras; I like the way you don’t have to worry about film usage – rationing out shots. I think it’s great for instructional uses and a tremendous tool when you are dissembling something you really would like to put back together correctly.

I think it’s great.

Yet, I have this box of old photos – black and white, early color ones, Polaroids. My grandma,  my folks, a couple of shots of my elusive-to-a-camera grandpa, my aunt, me little, me teen-aged, my dad with Robert William in front of the house in Kingman when he was just two, Quentin with his grandpa and Miss Alice. I can see these pictures in my head almost as well as I can see them in my hand.

What if I had hundreds – thousands – of shots of all these people? With Photoshop Actions?  I don’t know. In a way I think they might crowd out the memories of the heart.

I used to wonder about the families of  movie stars – watching someone look so alive and yet be so dead and gone. Now everyone is edging closer to that possibility as videos go way beyond the holiday get-togethers

I do like all the pictures – but I think I like them to share with others here and now. But I cherish the old ones – one snip in time – sometimes creased and folded at the edges.

A moment caught in a locket around my neck – a small frame sitting on the end table where I always sit – a face in special wooden box along with a keepsake or so.

When my mother died I slipped a picture of her mother, her father and a snapshot of her, my daddy and me in her casket. They were ones we had all looked at many times . . . ones that linked us together.