How will You Celebrate International Water Day?

remember when I cared for the little things. I remember when I photographed every flinch, every booger, every thing my kids did. I remember when the fridge was so festooned with pictures of houses and suns and bunnies it looked like some weird mountaintop Tibetan shrine. And I remember videotaping. Everything.

I've lost those tapes. I honestly don't know where they are. Our house is perpetually in flux as vast flocks of underwear and bras migrate from the upper floors to basement and back again and underneath it all somewhere is a box with enough footage of our kids to make a Scorsese movie. I was reminded of this, tonight, as I watched some dork with a camera glued to his face try to film his son make noises through a trombone.

I say make noises because even I, in all my glorious elaboration, cannot qualify the cacophony my son and all the other kids were creating with brass and plastic as music. It sounded like two coal trains beating each other to death with sousaphones.

My son was one of those trombonists. We're both into big band punk; and yeah it was great, I'm super proud of him. Because he'd shave the ears off the person in front of him with his trombone, Connor has to play with the slide pointed at the floor and my reward for rushing out into the killer Chicago rain was to just barely catch the crown of his head gently wobbling in the back row. And the guy with the camera.

This guy was into it and as the kids ploughed through Old McDonald's Band with all the joy and vive of a condemned Russian Prison orchestra, he was perfectly synchronized to the music. Mentally triangulating his position to maximize exposure of his neopraternatural yet minimize the amount of visual space his khaki covered ass was ruining for the people in the front row, he pranced into and out of an invisible box as deftly as Marcel Marceau miming a cube. He's doing this through a series of tics and glances and pardon mes and I realize this is a dance of record all young parents do. We're like bees wiggling lines that point to the best flowers. It's not the digital record this guy needs as much as the dance that tells the rest of the hive that over there is a flower of rare and distinguished pollen blowing sax.

I've been accused by camera wielding videophiles of not recording enough of my life. They ask, incredulously: where are my tapes? Where's my DVDs? Where's my bushel loads of polaroids and Kodak slick prints? Yeah. Well, I don't have any and the ones I do have are just weird. Look over there on the right: That wreck is my daughter's vanity. I didn't take a picture of hommes playing the slide but I got a shot of my girl's make-up nest in all its inglorious glory because ten years from now when she's talking up her neatnik newly wed husband about how she was a neat kid? Blackmail.

I never claimed to be a good photographer but I think I could probably take a good shot if I put my mind to it. And I know when a scene is worthy. (Scroll down for some of my masterwork.) But I don't want to experience my life through the objective lens of a multipixel Nikon. I like the patina ascribed to events by bad memory and the haze of prevarication. I like that the record of my life evolves as I tell it from humble vignettes into full blown Vegas level musicals with synchronized swimmers and trapeze artists. I don't like the truth. The truth is boring. Pictures, they're like corpses. But stories, they live.

Years from now, when I tell this pictureless story of Connor's recital I'll tell a version where he stands up in the middle of Frere Jaques to knock out a Tommy Dorsey number to a standing ovation; that Jesus appeared and gave Connor his own personal halo and recorded a promo for Connor's album on iTunes; that little second chair flute, Maggie Sween, turned around with tears in her eyes and kissed him right there and they're married to this day.

That beats the snot out of a picture any day.