Buried treasure
My office at home is frequently home to piles of disorganized pages of guitar chords and lyrics of songs I’m learning. Well, they’re not really disorganized; it’s just that they are organized in about a dozen different ways, so the end result is disorganization, anyway. So bad has it gotten that half the time I cannot lay my hands on the piece of music I want, and end up rifling through page after page. I decided to look into one of those digital sheet music displays I’d heard about, but when I learned they ran $900, I decided on plan B: I would just make sure all the music I had on paper was on my laptop, and I would fire that up to read my music. Everything would be organized alphabetically, and searching would be effortless. And it wouldn’t cost me a cent. I spent the greater part of my Saturday evening working on that.
I find a lot of my chords and tabs online and save them to my computer anyway, so I had most of them. But they were scattered here and there on a flash drive and a back-up hard drive and on the laptop itself, and there was a lot of other stuff mixed in between them, much of which I had to take a look at to figure out what it was.
I ran across “Manhã de Carnaval” and when I opened it to see if it was just lyrics or lyrics and chords, I found something totally unexpected. It was lyrics, and a screenshot photo I’d taken of A as we’d chatted on April 4, 2005, at 9:17:34 p.m. That moment in time had been recorded with such precision.
He was smiling as he looked at the screen, and I can only assume I put that smile on his face with my extreme wit. I was totally delighted to find this picture. It’s something of a miracle to receive a “new” picture of someone who died over 2 years ago. I don’t know why I put that screenshot there; all I can guess is I’d been working on finding those lyrics as he and I chatted, I needed a place to put the screenshot to get it off my clipboard, and that was the file that was open.
I was giddy to have found it. It felt like a gift, and still feels like one two days later. Photographs and memories…that’s really all I have left; everything else was lost or withheld. So one more picture is a real treasure.
Sunday morning in the shower, I was thinking about the photo, and how truly pleased I was to find it. It was then that it hit me that the reason those photos are so valuable is because he died. When he was alive, I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at photos when I could look at him directly. But that hadn’t figured into my emotional reaction when I found it; when I found it, all I felt was excitement and joy. It didn’t cause me even a moment of pain. And I realized then that, evidently, I have accepted the reality of his permanent (at least as far as this lifetime’s concerned) absence. Because if I had not, I would’ve been upset about having only had a photo unexpectedly restored to me instead of him. My pleasure in finding the photo tells me, I think, that I accept my world as it is now, and that is a world where he is only here in spirit, and a new photograph of a dead man really is a gift.
I don’t know if I’m making any sense. I guess I felt it was significant that the picture was a treasure I could appreciate for what it was, rather than to feel disappointed about because it was a vastly distant second to what I’d rather have and cannot. I am still a little ambivalent about this acceptance business, but healing was ever the goal, and I have to think this shift in perspective is a good thing.