lost, then found

on the trip to yosemite in july i lost my camera. it's nothing fancy. 4 m-pixels. i used it to take pix and shoot low-grade video. i lost it sometime after i shot an exit sign that said Maxwell, somewhere near a gas station maybe an hour outside san francisco. or at least that's the last time i remembered seeing the camera. we stopped in san fran for a couple days b/f our yosemite hike and i could not find the camera. this was a good thing in a way b/c it made me less reliant on the crutch of always shooting things as a way to make them meaningful. it made me appreciate the moment(s) in a deeper way.

still, i missed the camera. summer moved to autumn and we went on a couple trips that i couldn't document. autumn moved to winter and the streets are sudden icy death traps. yesterday i pulled out my long-forgot hiking shoes (better traction) and tucked inside was...my missing camera. i thought back to july, to pre-yosemite, remembering that i hiked in my running shoes instead of hiking shoes b/c they were lightweight and on a hike of that stripe every ounce gets noticed. so that was it, i must have, in a moment of quick i'll get this later that can happen in the swirl of travel, tucked the camera into my shoe and completely forgotten about it.

everything for a reason, right? (maybe wrong? maybe utter random confluence of timing, misfiring, dimness? maybe the mere belief in everything for a reason is the contemplative equivalent of thinking that a moment is meaningful if you take a pic of it?) undetermined. must return to this idea later.


today i uploaded all the pix on the camera and went thru them. recalling events from 7 months ago. the margin between the camera-toting me of then and the the freshly-reunited camera-toting me of now. maxwell had just died. we went to the japanese gardens, seeking a balm. kmac and adog got married. our cat got a bath.


i find meaning in these pix even as i mock my own need to document them. is the meaning in the reunion w/ them? w/ the nostalgia for lost time? are they meaningful the second the pic is taken or only months, years later? today these are the things that vex me, perplex me.