No trace?

If you're at all like me, you may have caught yourself at some point in the past year mistakenly assuming that virtually all of our actions are somehow recorded, or registered, or filed away on a hard drive somewhere. My alma mater is currently interviewing, in the wake of a hate crime, all of the individuals who used their electronic ID card to swipe themselves into a campus building at a particular time; meanwhile, a lawyer friend of mine recently relied on months of Wal-Mart security camera footage to document the presence of a client at a particular time. Looking for that e-mail that you mistakenly deleted? Gmail can likely retrieve it. And, as you wait in the cafe chair for it to do so, you may well form an unintended background element in a cell phone photo taken one table over.

But I'm here to tell you, friends, that in fact it's not all preserved, in pixelated form. On Tuesday, I took Cleo to Druid Hill park for a nice play session before we headed to the zoo to look for Curious George in the monkey house. (He wasn't, it turned out, in on that particular day). We watched oak leaves drift down from their lofty branches; we made tiny hammers out of sticks and tried them out on the benches. And then Cleo wandered over to the adult swings - swings that have always been, since she learned to talk, for "older children," and thus inspired a deep fear - and asked to get on.

Say no more, daughter. I lifted her up, rooted her tiny body in the center of the depression, and watched as her hands easily found the chains. I pushed her gently, only to learn that she wanted to go higher, and then higher still. And suddenly, there were were, a dad pushing his little girl on the real swings: graduates, with little fanfare, of the bucket swings intended for infants and the fainter of heart.

I felt like whooping - until I realized that the camera was in the car, instead of in my pocket. But didn't this moment deserve to be preserved? I wondered, for a moment, what to do. And then I knew: even if we left the playground without some sort of photographic proof, we would hardly be empty-handed. Lived moments can be indelible, after all, in several ways. They may leave a trace in wandering strings of ones and zeroes, in digital documents or JPG files. Alternatively, they may leave a much simpler mark: call it on the heart, or in the mind.

She swung. I type it, click on Publish Post, and the fact is stored on a server somewhere. But it was already stored, days ago, on a more fragile and more loving vellum.