We Don't Need No Stinkin' Pixels

I’ve never been much of a picture taker.

I’m like a journal writer who starts out every three to six month pause with, “Well, a lot has happened since last I wrote . . .” Except in my case, it’s with pictures in an album, and I have to tell people, “Somewhere in here I went white-water rafting down the Snake River, and shot the Big Kahoona in only my lifevest.”

That’s all changed with the birth of Porter.

As we were leaving for the hospital, a successful trip I might remind you, we scrambled to try to find out digital camera. It’s a nice camera, a Kodak something-or-other with 5-point-something pixel bytes of mega memory.

Yeah, that’s right, I’m big into my technobable.

Long story longer, we couldn’t find the camera and assumed we had packed it. ‘Course, you’re now saying, “Well, this wouldn’t be much of a story if Rob had actually packed it.” And you’d be wrong.

It’d be a HELLUVA story, since we came back with my first born son PORTER.

Sheesh, some people.

Still, aside from the physical evidence of Porter’s birth, we didn’t really have much of a chronicle to go by. I ran down to the gift store and picked up an out-dated and very dusty disposable camera with a hand-crank and pull-start. I believe some of those pictures will turn out pretty well . . . once I re-invent the processing to print them.

Then, two days ago, Porter smiled for the first time.

Sure, it might have been gas, but even then, it was a smile. A smile as if saying, “Thank you father, for giving me life and helping to bring me into this vast and interesting world where I will live up to all your lofty expectations and exceed all your pre-determined goals set for me without thought to my own individuality or personal needs.”

Yeah, it was that good.

And the first thought in my head was, “Damn, I don’t have my camera.” Because here was a golden moment that would never come again: Porter’s first smile. It was there for a moment, a handful of seconds and then it was lost forever. Sure, there will be other smiles, his second, and his forty-eighth, and his three-hundred-millionth. But there will never be another first.

But what I also realized was that I didn’t need a camera. I didn’t need to be one of those parents who watches their children grow up through the view finder of their digital camera on the off chance that they might miss “something”, some incredible “first” in their child’s life.

Sure, it would have been nice to have captured for all time and eternity the first smile that ever crossed my son’s face, but at the same time, I have captured it. I’m thinking of it even now.