Cell phone picures...

I have a new cell phone, a Palm Centro, attached like the last one surgically to my hip. But the old one is still around and I'm not ready to let it go quite yet.

It's not the phone, that's just the cheap LG they give you when you sign up for two years. But the phone has a camera and of the pictures taken is one of my brother, Paul, now with God for what seems like forever. The smile is typical, just a slight grin but it was taken in better times, one of those impulses of mine when we were all together. And I can't let it go.

Of course there are better pictures of Paul that exist but there was something about knowing it was there with me and the possibility of losing it when the signal goes dead that makes all the difference. In our adult life we traveled in two different worlds and this was the memory that was mine, the slight smile at a birthday or some kind of event when we all left our little universes and were a family again, a grainy picture on a cell phone.

I followed the instructions carefully, and sent the message to my new phone. And I will wait until morning to go on line and see if it is where I sent it. And when its firmly mine, and only then, will I take the phone off line. For some odd reason as long as that picture is with me, and no other picture will do, Paul somehow stays real and alive. The whole thing probably sounds stupid and corny but as the years pass and everything changes and we all end up wherever fate takes us I don't want to forget his face, not now, not ever.