During my recent visit to New York, during a sudden torrential downpour my rain parka pocket filled with water and drowned my phone. The Apple store rushed me in for urgent care but my phone could not be revived. I had to turn in my phone to get a new one. It was either that or go several days without my lifeline crutch thingy while traveling. Everything was Cloud backed up. Except for four months of photos. Except.
Most of my photos stink. That’s not the point. I don’t remember what all I lost. I guess that’s the point. I use my photos to capture all the days and moments of my life. Get-togethers with friends and family. Hikes. Concerts. (The concert photos are always especially bad, of course, and mostly photos of stage lights and the raised phone screens of other attendees.) Cats. The dog. Places I visit. I’ve been surprised at how big the hole feels to have lost this segment of my life. Fortunately it was only a few months. Only.
I never thought I would quote Reverend Jim, a well-despised character in my novel Scar Jewelry. But I now realize that at least one of his views is spot-on right. “Yeah that was sure a good scene, wasn’t it? What a moment. Nobody remembers the whole movie. Book. Concert. It’s the moments.”
[Insert bi-decadal, chagrinned, too-late reminder about regular backups here.]
Required Writing 
My story has a happy ending, but I thought for a few hours that I had lost all the photos from my phone (3 years worth) a while back. I had boxed up my broken phone and had my mom drop it off at the UPS store to ship it back to the manufacturer. Realized a couple of hours later that I had left my memory card inside. My mom went right back to the UPS store, lied and said that she had okayed it with the manufacturer, and opened the specially sealed box to get it out. That sick feeling when I thought they were all gone, though? I don’t wish that on anyone. So sorry for you! I started using Dropbox, which was working out very well until I tried to add my regular camera photos, too. Now I have the syncing permanently paused because the uploading process slows down my computer too much to even use it, and it supposedly still has days left to upload the pictures. Still haven’t discovered a way to cancel the sync altogether, either, which is super annoying.
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Ay yi yi. Actually I remember you on Plurk, raving (positively) about your mother’s heroic actions on that day. But I wasn’t aware of what the problem was that she had solved.
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