Paws

Everything has its advantages and disadvantages, I suppose. Advantage to say, digital photography over film is that it allows you to take virtually unlimited photos without much cost beyond startup for camera, computer, etc. Disadvantage is that it allows you to take, and store, virtually unlimited photos. The most memorable among them can get lost, needle-in-a-haystack style, amidst the ever-growing stack of others that may have been worth saving, but still, not quite so memorable.
As a former boss of mine used to say, “our strengths are also our weaknesses.”

Individual photographs, like individual or isolated memories, get lost--not irretrievably, they’re still stored in our minds or on our hard drive or Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and sometimes we can recapture them when somebody else happens across them, bringing them instantly back for us.

After work tonight I wandered over to my Flickr account, just to see what, if anything in my photo stream, other people had wandered across today, and I found this:

You may not be able to tell, but the photograph is of one cat’s paw, one dog’s paw, comfortably touching each other as their respective owners slept in the sun.

The dog and cat are both gone now--Sally the cat, an adventurous soul, hitched a ride somewhere in the undercarriage of a pickup truck; Bubba, the dog, loved to run, and particularly loved to run AFTER things, for instance, cars. He could run forever, swift as Secretariat--until he misjudged a car’s speed one day and tried to cross the highway ahead of it.

It is too long a story for OS, but Bubba started out life blind as a puppy, never began to see--or realize that he COULD see, I’m not sure--didn’t begin to be able to sort out images filtering into his brain until he was close to 4 months old. By that time he had been with us for nearly 2 months. All the cats more or less adopted him, but Sally also befriended him, and they spent a lot of time just wrestling and wandering around together and even simply dozing together on the lawn.

That somebody came across this particular photo, paws pausing together, brought the photo, the memory, back to me.

“These are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.” Bob Seger again (I’m sure I’ll quote and re-quote that line at least 1,438 times over the course of however long I keep posting here.)

Happy Monday to all, and to all, a good night.