My old phone was giving me trouble. I have three kids in their 20s and we don’t talk on the phone as much as we text via phone. And the buttons on my old phone were only working intermittently, which made for some unique messages since I didn’t always get the letters I was trying for.

So I “upgraded”.  New phone, for free, as long as I promise my undying allegiance to my phone company for two more years.  Why not?

But changing phones is a bit of a chore these days.  I don’t know anyone’s phone number any more.  I dial by name.  And my “contacts” are quite numerous.  So those have to be transferred to the new phone.

And then there are the messages.  And calendar.  And photos.

This is not going from a chunky rotary dial phone to a sleek princess push button phone.  That just required unplugging the old and plugging in the new.  This transition is a technological event.

Especially the photos.  I hate the idea of losing photos.  Sure it may just be a fraction of a second in time, but it captured someone I love and I don’t want to give it up.  Olan Mills loved to see me coming.

So I have spent the morning texting photos from my old phone to my email address so I can download them on my computer.

Processing all those photos reminded me of a joke my husband and I used to make when we would attend social events without our kids.  When asked about our children we would proudly produce a photo or two of our smiling cherubs.  If pressed as to why they weren’t with us we would answer, “Because they are so well-behaved in photographs.”

And that is the beauty of photographs.  And the temptation.

I am sorely tempted to sit at my computer all day and just look at pictures.  Pictures of smiling faces. Younger, fresher faces.  We are all so still in the photos.  It’s all very contained.  Memories.  Events.

It may have been hot the day the photo was taken, but I can’t feel it today.

Who knows what all was swirling around emotionally at the time the picture was snapped.  All I see is the fraction of a second recorded.  And it’s very doable.  I can live there.

Two of the photos from my old phone were of something I wrote at a wedding last year.  It was the wedding of one of the boys who grew up with my kids on our street.  One of the Five Points Family as we call ourselves.  It was nostalgic and sweet and had meaning for us…

Once upon a time there was a special place in Redford…where little rascals drove a Blur, and played for the Stanley Cup, and grew to be strong in the Force by kicking the can.  Autumn was festive and eggs were hunted, and the night sky was bright in July. Grass would not grow there but children thrived and so did love, and the harvest yielded memories galore.

Auld lang syne.  Days gone by.  Moments passed, yet captured.  Memories.

I am tempted to live there.

But I won’t.  I will push myself away from this keyboard.  (Now that I have saved all the photos.)  And I will boldly go where I have not yet gone…

Into the next moment.  I will dare to live in the unknown of the next moment.  And I will take my camera, and capture some fractions of those moments.

And I will wait for the day when these as yet uncaptured moments are the moments of days gone by.  When they will seem safe and comfortable and nostalgic.

And I will look at them and think, Look how well-behaved we all are.