I Can't Picture It

A bee on a flower. I took this picture.

A few Several Many, many years ago I decided I wanted a camera I could carry around in my purse. It needed to be small and light, but it also needed to be idiot-proof and take acceptable pictures. The boys were getting into their late high school years, and I wanted to be able to document that I had raised them to adulthood without putting them out of my misery.

The camera didn't have to be fancy--I didn't really care about soft focus and f-stops and all the fancy-schmancies that drive up the cost and weight of picture taking. Also, I am a dreadful photographer. (Did you know my only grade of C in my ENTIRE LIFE was in a college photography course? It's true.)

Anyway, after due diligence (read: countless hours of compulsively reading C-Net and dithering) I landed on the Canon SD 850 and counted out the egg money to buy it.

It turned out to be the perfect camera. Small and light? Check. Pretty much idiot proof? Check. Can be used in low light? Check.

I documented the birthdays and school programs, the graduations and proms, the celebrations and my Mom's funeral flowers. The camera lived in my purse and when I saw a bumblebee on a flower I would grab it for an artsy shot. Some of them, astonishingly enough, even turned out okay. When I dropped the camera and cracked the screen, I paid almost as much as the original purchase price to have it repaired; I liked the camera that much.

Last Thursday I took a picture of Pepper and downloaded it for this blog. On Saturday I went shopping and was in a half dozen stores. Monday I grabbed for the camera to take a picture of a roadrunner, and the usual spot in my purse was empty. Apparently it dropped out of my purse sometime between Thursday and Monday.

I've looked all over the house, under the seats of the car, in the lining of the purse. I've called all the stores I visited Saturday. My camera and the three memory cards filled with almost 1,500 photos are nowhere to be found.

Cameras and memory cards are things, they are not people. They are not even Pepper. The pictures are mostly backed up on my computer. But I'm surprisingly sad about the loss, and not (only) because I'll now have to dig into the egg money again and buy another camera.

I really, really liked that camera and now it's gone.

Sigh.