No Camera Required

I really love to take pictures, but I don’t know if I would call myself a photographer. It’s not so much the precision of the picture itself that I concern myself with as much as capturing the memories of whatever it is that I am doing while I am taking the pictures. At pretty much any event I go to with friends, family, Christian and/or Hobbes, I usually have my camera with me to snap at least a few pics to help encapsulate it into memory. And at the end of every year, I put them together along with other mementos into a scrapbook for a Christmas gift for Christian, a tradition that started 1.5 years into our relationship together and will now be entering its 7^th iteration this holiday season.

Since we moved to the west coast, my trips home to Pennsylvania to visit my family have become much less frequent than when I lived a short 90 miles away in Washington, DC. Like anything that was once plentiful and then becomes rare, I now appreciate these visits much more than I used to, and I think the same is true for them seeing me. Pretty much every time I go home, I have my camera in hand, snapping as many pictures as I can of my nephews as they grow up too fast, my grandmother sipping her standard glass of champagne, and other family moments. Often when I call my mom she references having just had dinner with my brother and wife or that my nephews had all just left after spending an afternoon in the pool. I have to admit it’s sometimes hard to hear the everyday things that happen there that I’m not a part of by virtue of where I have chosen to settle my life.

This past weekend, Christian’s mom and stepdad (Jane and Skip) arrived with a moving truck from Dallas to move here to the Bay Area. They had asked if they could borrow our SUV for awhile as they run all of the errands that you need to when you are moving into a new house. So I drove out to see them yesterday to welcome them to San Francisco and check out their new house. Melissa and Alex (C's sister and husband) were also there, with their two adorable little boys, and it was quite a site to see them as they are unpacking in their new digs, just a few minutes from where Melissa lives and about 30 min from our place.

I spent about an hour there, getting the tour of the house, hearing about the plans they have to decorate, and regaling at the size of their yard, as it will be Hobbes’ new vacation home when we are away. After that, I popped over to Melissa and Alex’s and played trains with their 3-year old, Alister for a bit. Then I went upstairs to hang out ("visit", as C calls it) with the adults for awhile, also playing “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out” on Alex’s rad original Nintendo that he got from Ebay a month ago. Then it was time to go, so Alex and Alister drove me back to my house, and we made plans for me to come back out for dinner sometime this week or next.

Once I was home last night, I realized that I had not taken my camera along and therefore took no pictures. And as much as I love to usually commemorate big days like yesterday, what I’ve come to realize is that because of Jane, Skip, Melissa, Alex, Alister and Beckett’s proximity to where we live, we’re going to have lots of days like this. Families who live close to each other do stuff like this all the time; hanging out during the day, eating dinner together, giving each rides, etc. Things like these are going to become much more commonplace, and therefore, the need to take pictures to capture the “preciousness” of it will become less.

Not that I won’t appreciate the increase in family time; if anything, being so far from the family that I grew up with makes me even more eager to invest in the family that I married into here. But for the first time as an adult, I’ll get to have a family living in the same town that I am. What a great feeling.

So my camera may not be used quite as often on these family days, but that’s okay. We’ll just have to take additional trips to Pennsylvania to appreciate coming home to SF and our family here even more.