Familyhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

get married more, or have more birthdays, or have more kids. Babies haven’t gotten cuter, kittens aren’t playing in hammocks with balls of yarn more frequently than they used to.
    But we’ve made adjustments; we’ve expanded our notion of what constitutes a tender moment. College graduations and high school graduations don’t allow enough opportunity for recording special moments, so we’ve started making a bigger deal out of elementary and kindergarten graduations. We film Open School nights. We film the opening of every gift and greeting card. We record not only “Baby’s first solid food” but also every dinner partner’s first bite of “You won’t believe how good this is!”/“You won’t believe how spicy this is!”/“You won’t believe how disgusting this is!” We film sunsets. We film people looking at sunsets. We film people learning how to use their new memory-capturing device while standing in front of a sunset. We record anything that seems important or that could, upon reflection, later seem important or, at a bare minimum, anything that might someday make a nice screen saver.
    This kind of Emotional Event inflation can only go so far. Modern fishermen have used all kinds of complicated machinery to catch so many fish that now we’re running out of certain species entirely. So too we may have depleted our stock of tender moments to such a degree that fewer and fewer things feel truly spontaneous, meaningful, and real. The expectation and practice that everything special will be recorded has led us to treat everything as special, the result being that now nothing feels so special. Instead, it all feels like movies we’ve seen before, reruns from our own lives.
    WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, my father always described our family vacations as “making memories.” We didn’t have to enjoy the trips; we just had to go, and take pictures.
    I am blessed to have so many nice memories. And thanks to the technology we have now, these memories flash across my computer screen all day.
    Next to my computer on my desk is a black-and-white photograph of my mother and father on their wedding day. They look impossibly young: he, in his army uniform, looking like a cross between John Garfield and Glenn Miller; she, beautiful and sparkling, a Jewish Donna Reed. Stare at it long enough and you can just make out the sounds of their thoughts, the excitement for the future. Knowing what will and what will not be for these two young people, my parents, makes it almost unbearably beautiful and sad. The photo captures a tender moment that I wasn’t alive to experience. It’s photos like that which compel me to risk my boys’ irritation. One day, I imagine, long after I’m gone, maybe they’ll look at a photo of their mother and me and wonder what we were thinking and feeling. (I can give them a hint: My wife was wondering why I had asked this stranger or waiter or bus driver to take yet another photo. And I was thinking: “Why couldn’t this guy count before he took it? Who doesn’t count to three before taking a photo?”)
    THE TRUTH IS my boys probably won’t be able to even find a photo. Our generation takes more pictures than any before it, but if I actually want to find a particular picture, I have no idea where it is. Never been cheaper and easier to take photos and videos, yet somehow none of them seem to last. They disappear into files or onto flash drives or into thin air. Photos are becoming like pensions: something we relied on and assumed would be around forever, but then turn out, to our great surprise, to have all pretty much evaporated.
    And it’s not just me, either. NASA spent a lot of money taking photos and filming their trips. Understandably; if you go to the moon, it’d be nice to see a picture. Well, apparently, they lost a whole bunch of film from the moon landings. This is NASA