lost in translation

A few months ago, the MacBook I'd ordered arrived in the mail. Unwilling to grope my way through getting to know a new machine, I asked a friend - a highly recommended Mac expert - to set things up.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, a few thousand pictures were lost. Pictures of slaughter from Rwanda, of wildlife in Kenya, of sandy beaches in Tanzania, of buddhas in Thailand, of family in Taiwan, of the DMZ in Korea. Evidence of my frolicking unemployment in America? Poof...

The downside to all this loss - apart from the obvious - is its reinforcement of my already significant technophobia. The silver lining is that I had uploaded the best of the batch (albeit in lower quality) onto the web for sharing with friends and family. Thanks to my technophobia, the best of the best had also been printed and organized in actual photo albums.

I spent some time mourning the loss of these digital files and the memories they captured. In trying to grasp my loss, I also realized what I didn't lose -- the memories themselves. I remembered the moments that never made their way into the camera because lions mated too quickly, or because I was paddling for my life, or because I was too busy laughing. Because what I saw and smelled and felt could not be captured by the technology at hand.