Moving pictures
“Technology can be both wonderful and brutal,” I commented to Fergus as we both sat in the family room at 4 in the morning listening, or rather trying not to listen to the smoke alarm sporadically going off.
There was no fire. If there had been a fire, we’d have been shivering outside on the street instead of sitting shivering in the family room. There definitely wasn't a fire, but try telling our network of smoke alarms that.
Mr. Tweddle, fixer and protector of all things in Tweddley Manor, was of course, on hand trying to solve the problem. Standing on a chair wearing nothing but his underpants, intensely negotiating with one of the smoke alarms, he was a veritable older, cuddlier Scottish version of Bruce Willis in Die Hard. And I might have told him that, if the smoke alarm didn't intermittently keep going off.
As difficult as it was for us, it was 10 times as hard for Arthur. Dogs’ ears aren’t meant for smoke alarms. His poor wee body was rattling with fear. I gave him some meds snuggled into a bit of leftover pizza. Then he was conflicted. He hated the smoke alarm, but then again… pizza.
And I guess Lachlan would have been grumbling alongside us, but for some reason, the smoke alarm in his room was behaving perfectly normally. Also, Lachlan is a heavy sleeper. When that boy is at rest, nothing short of an earthquake will rouse him.
Sitting in the half-light of the family room, Fergus grunted. “Yeah,” he said, “Technology really can be brutal.”
Here in the Valley, some weeks are busy and some weeks are calm, some are chaotic and others quite serene. This week, I dunno. This week has been kind of all of them on one go - as if Nature wants to remind us how many colors there are.
The garden has been resolutely producing blooms. The tomato seeds I planted a couple of months ago are now mental flowering seedlings. Work is busy and I never seem to have enough time to get to projects. And everything is about to get busier as we open Fish And Bear in two more venues. I know Mark is excited. It’s like he found in Fish And Bear, that elusive thing he’s wanted to work in all along.
And actually, if I stay away from the news, life is really pretty good - expensive for sure, but good. Post-birthday, the house is awash with cakes and deliciousness that I seem to always find the boys furtively digging into. Ripley, our rescue chicken, seems to be finally settling in with the flock. Grendel the rescue rabbit is enjoying his new rabbit enclosure so much he seems to have grown about three inches. And Arthur is just Arthur. He too is getting older, but there’s something deeply pleasing about watching him swagger territorially around the backyard, or plonk himself down on the back steps to bathe in the sun.
On top of that, my mother-in-law always does this totally lovely thing when it’s my birthday. She’s a brilliant gift giver, and on top of whatever thoughtful gift she sends me, she’ll also send me a gift card or an Amazon voucher and say - “Spend this on something daft or ridiculous just for you.”
And this year, I knew exactly what I wanted to spend it on. (No, it wasn’t a new set of smoke alarms) It was - cue drum roll - one of those digital photo frames. (Yes, sue me, I really am that dull.)
You see, I have tons of photos that I haven’t looked at for ages. They sit unnoticed on phones or computers, and occasionally I used to post them on Instagram or Facebook. or they lie in boxes at the back of a cupboard. But once upon a time, they meant something.
Back in the day everybody looked at photos. Even when they were completely rubbish. We had shitty old cameras that we had to buy a spool of film for, and then once we used up the spool, you had to send them off to be developed. And then you just hoped you had something decent in there, because in the shitty old cameras, there was no way of predicting what you were going to get.
And then when your photos came back from the developers, somebody had their head chopped off, or the photo was blurry, or they were just completely shit. But no matter how shit they were, they were still treasured and put in albums, and they were looked at.
And what dawned on me of late as I try to avoid the torrent of incandescent bullshittery online, is how much of my life I seem to have handed over to it.
Nowadays, it’s easy to take a photo at any time, and I don’t know if that’s what has made them meaningless, or that we’ve learned to devalue anything that reflects our real life rather than the one that’s presented online. But I do know that so much of my time is spent looking at photographs of people I do not know or don’t respect, whereas too many images of those who matter to me lie dormant.
So, now armed with my handy new gift from my mother-in-law, Sandra, I’ve spent a whole load of the week transferring the photos from my phone and computer to the digital photo frame. It’s been really quite something rediscovering moments that once were.
And honestly, these digital photo frames are quite something. They can store thousands of pictures. And not just pictures, but they take little videos of people moving around too. It’s a bit like being in a Harry Potter story - except it’s real life as opposed to something made up by a woman who started hating everyone once she got rich. And also in real life, the personification of all evil is not some guy with half a face, but instead a fat bloke with orange skin and half a hairpiece. (Honestly, in terms of personification of all evil, how bad do you have to be to pick an actual fight with the Pope?)
I probably bought a frame that was a bit on the large side, so I haven’t worked out where to put it yet. So until I do, I’ve put it in the family room. And it is strangely soothing to watch the pictures click by when you're sitting there at 4 in the morning waiting for the smoke alarms to calm down.
In the darkness of the early morning, when Fergus and I sat shivering, my mother’s face shone out. Then a picture of both my parents dancing. There was a shot of Mark and I with Fergus as a newborn, and then an image of my family in Scotland as we went en masse to Stirling Castle. There was a sequence of pictures of us building this house, followed by one of Lachlan as a preschooler dressed as Batman, next to his (ever more practical) friend Clark, dressed as a UPS driver. And then a black-and-white picture of Mark’s parents when they were dating.
It was beautiful. Truly beautiful. Even within the misery of unpredictable smoke alarms. And if it is true that your life does flash before your eyes when you die, then mine is going to be really pretty enjoyable.
Eventually, Mark called over, “I have to reset the system, so it might get a little loud.” I said OK, and Fergus covered his ears, and Arthur trembled and looked at me, hoping for more pizza.
And five minutes later, with the system reset and our ears still ringing, we were back in our beds, hearts still racing. “What was the score with the smoke alarms?” I asked Mark.
“Who knows,” he said. “It seemed to have tripped itself up. Technology - sometimes it’s magic and other times it’s brutal.”
And while the digital photo frame flipped through snapshot after snapshot, I closed my eyes and wondered whether I should have taken a photograph of Mark as an older, cuddlier, Scottish John McClane. And I smiled to myself. Probably best I didn’t.
Lynn
Xo
PS: Every time you click on the wee heart emoji, our smoking detectors do their fucking job and detect for smoke rather than drive us crazy. Thats a totally lie obviously, but maybe just maybe… it might work :D
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