A Few Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures

This week, one of my sisters sent me a link to an album she set up online with scanned photos of people on my Mom's side of the family. Some are of people I know well and see all the time. Some are of people I knew who are no longer with us. And some are of people (like my Mom's parents) whom I never knew.

I also, this week, spent one of those small but miraculous, unplanned moments with my youngest daughter standing by the edge of a pond at dusk enthralled by a heron that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere while we were watching some ducks. I wrote a paragraph about it on Facebook.

I'm 50 now and a quarter of my life is behind me. Years and years from now, a grand- or great-grand- or great-great-grandchild of mine might be sitting around with his or her family wondering about me. This child (let's call him David Junior, or DJ for simplicity) can look at pictures of me and not learn much (besides the fact that I was devilishly handsome). He can look at pictures I took of my family and see that I was surrounded by beautiful people. But if he really wants to get to know me, he'll read through the blog posts and Facebook statuses that I wrote.

"What a guy," he'll think. "He sure was full of himself..." he'll observe, "...but some of the things he talks about and reflects on are things I can really learn from."

"Funny how much like him I am. What times he lived in. He sure loved his family. I think I could do worse than to be a Dad like him." And so on.

(I'm not sure why DJ doesn't just come visit me in Phoenix to get to know me better - just 5 minutes away by transporter - but let's say he doesn't like being pulled into billions of pieces and put back together 3,000 kilometers away. Kids these days.)

My point is that clearly... CLEARLY... a few words are worth far more than the pictures we seem so fixated on taking.

I watch parents hiding behind their cameras taking pictures of their kids playing soccer, or performing in the school play, or making a speech at graduation - instead of taking it all in. The sounds of kids running around and having fun. The smell of fresh cut grass on the soccer field. The warm breeze from the parent standing behind him or her, breathing down his or her neck...

Nobody's going to be able to experience THAT moment, that miraculous come-and-gone-never-to-be-seen-again moment, by looking at the picture. The parent will look at the picture once or twice and then put it away (physically or digitally) in an album somewhere. It will spark memories that were never really shared. And years from now, somebody may look at the picture, say 'nice picture', and then wonder about the people it captured all those years ago (like I did this week, staring at pictures of the grandparents I never knew.)

A few years ago, my two older daughters and I shared a moment that I'm sure will always be amongst the top 5 moments of my life. We were on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We took surfing lessons together and then spent a morning in cold water under grey clouds trying (mostly without success) to stand on a surfboard and ride it to shore. After hours of this, we pulled our boards up onto the beach. I went to the car and grabbed a cooler full of sandwich-fixings and some drinks. We sat shivering and exhausted on our boards, ripping into fresh bread with our fingers, stuffing the bread with tomato, cheese, and sliced turkey, then hungrily wolfing down our ragged sandwiches.

And then - for the first time that day - the sun came out.

I have photos of us from that day in our wetsuits, posing with our surfboards. I have pictures of us trudging down the beach into the water, and later back to the car. There is no photo of the moment I just described. There doesn't have to be. I can still see it vividly. I can still taste what was probably one of the best meals of my life sitting out there on the beach. I can still feel the sun on my clammy skin.


I didn't take a picture of the heron, either, the other night.

Or the moment that my youngest daughter was born with her two (much) older sister cowering in the delivery room bathroom listening to the mayhem.

Or the time my wife and I were in Barcelona and fell back in love with each other and food and walking and architecture and museums (but not sangria) - all in the same afternoon.

My words can't do justice to any of these moments, but they come far closer than a photo ever could.


I don't mean to get judgy or self-righteous when I complain about people hiding behind their cameras. I do it too and miss things when I do (and then kick myself when somebody says "Did you see that!?!" and I realize that I didn't).

When I look at the people in the photos in my sister's album, I can only wish that they were here to tell me about themselves: how they lived, what they believed, who they were, who they wanted to be, what made them happy, what made them sad...or that they at least wrote those things down. Their few words would be worth so much more to me than the carefully posed photos that say next to nothing.

Take pictures. Tell stories. Write them down.

DJ will thank you.