Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 14

I greatly admire these folks who produce a New Year’s letter detailing all the wonderful things they managed to cram into the last twelvemonth. I never read one without getting inspired to do one myself, but after sitting in front of a blank screen for ten minutes unable to think of a single thing worth mentioning to my suddenly hypercritical circle of acquaintances, I give it up, thoroughly depressed at the apparent barrenness of my existence. This is where it used to be useful to have a diary—you could flip through the entries and reassure yourself that your life was in fact much more eventful than feeble memory allows—but who has had time for a diary since they were fourteen?

Well, folks, I am not just here to deepen your blues, I am here to announce a solution. Technology to the rescue.

I discovered it by accident. It works like this. Last Christmas, Mary picked up on some subtle hints and bought me my own personal smart phone. Yes, I realize I am about a decade late with this but it had taken me years to master all the hidden features of my flip phone and I was loath to just cast all that hard-won knowledge away. It seems to be a tenet of the digital age that the moment ordinary folk begin to get comfortable with any device or program, it’s time to declare that product obsolete, stop supporting it and force everyone to adopt a new version where all the familiar functions are hidden in inconvenient new places. I was holding out against this pernicious trend, but eventually decided being able to get Instagram pictures of the new grandbaby at all hours of the day would be worth it. I asked for the cheapest one available, with an eye to keeping the guilt factor to a minimum if I should lose it or wreck it, because my plan was to keep it in my jacket pocket so I’d always have it in case I found myself on the scene of another Dziekanski tasering or at least of someone going under the table at the office Christmas party.

I promptly forgot about this ambition and left the phone at home most of the time but, it turns out, not all the time. Not having figured out how to sort the various outings into separate “albums” the way the (incomprehensible) manual recommends, my entire year’s shooting is jammed pell-mell into one giant file in my computer’s My Pictures directory, and through some crossing of virtual wires I find myself watching this entire file run past my eyes in “Slide Show” mode.

There’s the bunch from the office down at Baker’s Beach for an after-work swim last July. Now, in the inky depths of winter it seems almost impossible to imagine swimming outdoors, let alone having enough sunlight to do it after work! What was that cute co-op student’s name, anyway? Now here’s a scene I was trying to forget: one I took for insurance purposes showing the charred rubble that was all that remained of our rental house after it burned at the end of last year. Was that a mere year ago? Funny how the big traumas seem further away than they are. There’s that chubby three-point buck who kept our grapevine so nicely trimmed all summer. I wonder whose freezer he’s in right now? Whoever it is, I hope they appreciate the fine grapey aftertaste. There’s friend Anna with her trousers rolled up wading through that funny landlocked tidepool we discovered up at the head of Hotham Sound last August, proof we got at least a little boating in this year. And here’s the going-away party for our prized editorial prodigy Emma, leaving the coast to start a new life closer to civilization and eligible bachelors. The year was not without its touching moments, now that I think of it. And speaking of that, here’s sweet Callan, our brand new grandson, squinting at the light on his first day of life. That alone is enough to make this a year among years. Now here’s a nice one—it’s spouse Mary, sitting with my 101-year-old dad and his 98-year-old bride Edith in their sunny September garden, their late-life love preserved for all time.

The random images flow on, kindling memory. And to think, this absorbing pageant is but a tiny fragment of all that really did happen, a few random samples from the times I actually remembered to take the phone, and to occasionally raise it up and click. It gives me a new appreciation of all that can happen in a single year, a year that I couldn’t think up anything to say for just an hour ago.

It’s a great cure for the January blues. This year I’m going to take twice as many pictures and call it my photo diary. Maybe I can even turn it into a bestselling book: Photo-Therapy: How to Click Your Way to a New Appreciation of Everyday Life. Try it. I recommend it.