The other day Kristy and I played Pictionary with the kids. My six year old is getting a lot better at illustration, so he's able to keep up with the rest of us now and it’s pretty fun. Some of the pics we draw (myself included) are hot garbage, for sure. We’re a family of word people—not artists. But some of the pictures are actually good, and that’s always a pleasant surprise. Later that night, I posted this picture/statement to Facebook as sort of a joke:
I mean…it’s only sort of a joke because it really was a magnificent caterpillar—sections, bends, antennae, the whole shebang. Conor did not have to work hard to guess that one. The joke sort of falls apart, though, when you have smart-ass friends who say things like “just take a picture with your PHOOOONE!” (which is funny, but not the point—especially when we were moving through the game fast and I didn’t have my phone nearby).
But one of my friends replied with the following, and I kind of love it: “It’s a life lesson. Enjoy it while you can.” That dumb caterpillar picture really did get me wondering about the whole fleeting nature of things, because I can’t ever seem to leave well enough alone. And I’ve held onto this one for a couple days now.
You can’t save images when you’re using a dry-erase board and moving fast. You have the image in your head for a short while, it has an immediate function, and then it disappears. I think that idea is part of why I take a lot of pictures when I’m traveling or sightseeing. Sometimes I see something amazing at just the right moment at just the right angle with just the right amount of light, and I want to capture it so I can remember it exactly as it is.
It’s not just travel sights and Pictionary, though. There are many things that work like this. Sand castles. Mind-blowing dinners. A stunning sunset you notice seconds before it ends. A perfect cupcake your kid devours before you can blink. A giant, crater-pocked full moon framed by a spectacular starfield that there’s no way your phone camera could ever capture. Fireworks. A kiss. A touch. A smell.
There are so many ephemera we see and feel as we make our way through our lives. So many things we’d like to hold onto forever (or at least a long, long time). We save what we can and file it away as reminders of what we saw or felt or experienced. We have photo albums and scrapbooks full of these things, though I wonder how true even that is in an increasingly digital age.
Part of me wants to fight the urge to hold onto these transitory things—to just let go and be in the moment and experience things, and then let my sensory memories sort out what matters most later. Presumably the truly important things will linger longest and come to mind when I need them. Do I really need to take a picture if my eyes are seeing it? Do I really need to hold onto a piece of construction paper on which my kid scribbled something wonderful? Do I need to hold onto an email or a text that made me feel great on a really shitty day?
The answer to all those questions is “probably not.” Life is a sequence of lived experiences, not a collection of memories made tangible (or digital). I understand that in theory. But in practice, I often hold onto these things anyway. I value the memories of experiences almost as much as I value the experiences themselves, because I’m not sure I trust my mind to recall those memories quickly or accurately. So I take the picture or write out the memory really quick before it’s gone.
And now that dumb, magnificent caterpillar is going to stick around for a while, even if I’ll forget exactly what it looked like. We’re not talking a Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” kind of permanence or transcendence here. We're not even talking about the clichéd, expected ending. It just occurred to me that there should be some damned thing about a butterfly in a post that started with a caterpillar. Nope. I wanted to say something about pretty things that don’t last—not about things that transform. (Maybe that's something for another time.)
I’m well aware that even the words I’ve written about this fleeting sketch are not particularly important, and they'll eventually fade away. But they'll last longer than a random game night or a Facebook memory that will pop up a year from now. And they'll remind me that Conor and I were locked in and mind-melded or something that night, that Grant kept playing with his loose front tooth (that finally popped out today), and that a half-drawn cactus can yield a successful answer that wins a game. It's not really about the caterpillar. It's about all the things surrounding that image. And that's worth holding onto, even if the thing itself escapes.
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