I’ve been thinking lately about the incredible advances in technology since I was a kid. Take, for instance, the digital camera. I used to be a fairly avid, semi-serious photographer. I had an expensive Canon and a leather bag full of lenses and filters and cool camera stuff. I even did some semi-pro work. (I like to tell about the time that I was sent over the hill to Nevada to take a series of pictures of a gentleman who was becoming famous for his tie-dye and batik techniques. The article headline was “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him dye.”)
Sorry.
But even though I still have a nice film camera, now I almost exclusively use a digital point-and shoot. We’re on our third one, because the cameras have improved quite a bit in just the few short years they’ve been available. Plus I have a little of that technogeek upgrade bug that irritates some spouses. This little digital marvel fits easily in my beautiful wife’s purse, or my pocket, and with the larger memory card and super double-A batteries, we can take hundreds of pictures without a pause to reload or anything. We can and do take too many photos of everything, come home, load them in the computer, save and sometimes even print them — just so handy, and private, and easy. Over the last several years we have used it so often that we have entire albums of stuff filed in the computer. We have family albums (with two kids and four grandkids, my brother, his four kids, etc.), band albums (we own the Straight Ahead Big Band and Jazz Combo), vacation albums (we try to get away two or three times a year). At my wife’s insistence I do try to print some in each category that she can show people without traipsing back into our home office to turn on the computer.
But this isn’t really about the cameras as about where things unexpectedly lead us. A couple of years ago, my brother was asked to be in a wedding in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The bride was the daughter of his best friend, a man who had died a year earlier, unexpectedly and way too young. My brother was honored to be asked to stand in his friend’s place and immediately said yes. He asked if I wanted to accompany him, maybe take a couple extra days and see some of the country – visit a Civil War battlefield, see where they make Jack Daniel’s. So I went along. We went to the country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, visited the fine folks in Lynchburg (pop. 361), and walked on the fields at Chickamauga where our great-grandfather was wounded exactly 139 years earlier, to the day. We ate pulled pork and catfish, tried boiled peanuts, and enjoyed a fantastic family-style Italian rehearsal dinner. The wedding itself was a gorgeous affair on the grounds of an old historic house in Atlanta.
My brother and I each took cameras on that trip and took lots of pictures. We combined photos and each have great albums of the trip, but one photo started something at my house that the kids think is odd even for us.
My brother and I were driving our rental van along rural route 82 in Tennessee when we passed a large, strange object alongside the road. We asked each other if we had really just passed a dead cow. We did, and we hung a big U-turn and went back. This was the photo op of the trip! We have no idea why the cow was left there, and it had obviously been there a day or two. Add that sight – especially our pictures of it – and the “Roadkill Grill” poster that somebody had given the cook (me) at our house, and you have the start of a strange photo album. Since that fateful day in Tennessee, the handy little digital camera that accompanies us on all our trips has chronicled the roadside demise of all kinds of critters – squirrels, deer, rabbits, birds, snakes, frogs – but no pets ( that wouldn’t be right). And we didn’t cause any of it; we just happened along and photographed the results. If you’re ever at our house, you can ask to see it. It’s kind of interesting, really.
It’ll probably be martini time about then.
