I tried, I really tried. I have an iPadmini that takes pictures and people told me to take pictures and show them where I was. It took a lot of effort and I didn't succeed as you will know if you followed my blogs. I had to remember to take Minnie with me, and to charge it , and not to use up the battery reading the New York Times (I got it daily online), And then when I was out there, wherever, gazing at something, I had to remember to take a picture and that was even harder than remembering and then when I was back in my stateroom I had to transfer the pictures to my computer and then I had to figure out how to send them to my blog - and I often managed only to send a diagonal line drawn across the screen. And then -- after a while -- I thought, why do I need a picture of this? Aiming and focusing and figuring out what to do when I could be just looking and gazing and loving seemed a difficult choice to make.
I managed to send a few pictures and I have more and I'll try to figure out how to send them, for what they're worth. I still prefer to hold things in my memory and Ii'm getting choosier all the time about what I want to keep, not just pictures but things. I have come home determined to throw more stuff out. What about souvenirs? you ask. A souvenir, as you know, and according to the online dictionary, is "a thing that is kept as a reminder of a person, place, or event." When you've lived as long as I have that can add up to a lot of things. I found myself increasingly resistant to tschotschkes as well as to pictures. My children are going to have enough trouble as it is to sort out my remains, not my remains, but my reminders -- Spelcheck just presumed I meant remains not remainders. Reminders is better.
So here is an event not immortalized in an iPad moment. I went on a river cruise of the Waluah River (I think that's how it's spelled); I'll have to check) -- remember? -- that time when I couldn't see but I could hear the howling monkeys? The trip was lovely: the heat was gently eased and dispelled by the faint breeze generated by the motion of the boat. A jungle enclosed us on either side, giant ferns and plants I couldn't name. I gazed and gazed, and thought of a cold fjord I shivered by a couple of years ago now when I circumnavigated Newfoundland. The foliage was far different, and crags and rocks vied for attention as opposed to ferns, macaws and monkeys (that I never saw). But I was there, fully there. And the two experiences, vastly different and worlds apart, layered themselves into my consciousness and into my memory.
Not, however, into my iPad.