That marvelous little digital camera that I purchased for the unheard of sum of $400.00 dollars is now considered a museum piece. I understand that it has something to do with the way that the wheels of progress are turning. I suppose those wheels turn no matter what I think, or who I am or where I am. Considering that aspect of existence, I have come to the conclusion that my camera is not the only museum piece around here. I am acutely aware of remembering at 1.30 PM that I am not at another meeting that has started half an hour ago. Oh well, too late to be fashionably late, too early to arrive early for the next meeting. When my son talks to me about these memory lapses he smiles benignly and explains once more that it has something to do with the synapses in the brain. They don’t fire as easily as they used to.

The gentle little checkout clerk at the grocery store around the corner smiles at me in the same way when she hands me the keys to my car that I was about to leave behind. Not to mention the carry-out who meets me at the car door with my groceries. He gets a little wittier and says:” I thought I’d save you the trip back to the store.” Of course it doesn't help much that he gets to my car before I do and I know he left the store after I left. My friend Gerry Balzer still smiles when we reminisce about the time I talked in to my tea cup and left the phone behind:” I believe you’re fading away!” I caught his remark somewhere between the kitchen and the front room. I suppose my camera and I are co pathetic about being museum pieces. But wait- there’s more!!!!!!

I have bones that ache and legs that are sometimes unwilling to tread common grounds with me. Does my camera have little aches and pains that I am not aware of? Of course the guru would deny that flat out. He would make me aware of a long drawn out history of giving physical attributes to a machine. That little machine and I shared lots of common trips to the park taking pictures of the tiniest of wild flowers. My neighbors smile benignly and call them “weeds”. The camera does not complain when I complain about a picture. Could it be that my eyes do not see these pictures in my camera as clearly as I used too? The difference between the camera and I is that there are new cameras that do things better and faster. Of course I am familiar with that complaint. There are people in my life that do things faster and better than I do. Is that a common denominator for Museum Pieces?

Observing that museum piece syndrome more carefully I find that there are lots of things museum pieces have in common. They are, as a rule, carefully preserved with expensive preservation methods. Of course I am in some ways carefully preserved by my trusted physician, and may I say, expensively preserved. The pharmaceuticals she prescribes for me are everything except cheap. I have friends who admire and even desire old cars, old furniture, old china, and old paintings. Personally I could care less. I am not a devotee of antiques. But I do love documentaries that deal with antiquities. Josephus wrote a history of the Jews and titled it THE ANTIQUITIES OF THE JEWS. He completed that task about two thousand years ago. I often wonder if I would have valued that book when I was twenty or thirty or even forty. Although at that time I valued the antiquities of the Romans and the Greeks, not to mention all those mythologies.

Could it be that ANTIQUITIES as a whole and the way we react toward them is merely a frame of mind? My friend Skyler is somewhere at the beginning of her teens, and Logan who is Gerry’s grandson, sees me as his girlfriend although he is not yet ten. Give them a few years and they will definitely see my camera as a museum piece. Hopefully my friends will always see me as a friend. Maybe it is that way because we see each other with the eyes of the soul.

My little camera is not the only museum piece in my office. On the shelf above my computer lies a little piece of rope attached to a little wooden dowel. It used to be purple, but it has grown respectfully grey with age. My Grandmother knew it very well. There were hundreds of those hanging on a wall in the barn of my grandmother’s farm. If Uncle Johann cut the grains from morning ‘til sunset, my Aunt Martha gathered the sheaves and tied them with ropes just like this one. I often wonder what became of the others when the last harvest was brought in, the last of the cattle left the barn and when the farm was sold. That little rope is a museum piece, long since replaced by newer methods. And so has my little camera proved itself to be replaceable by something newer and faster. But I can still go out to the park and carefully aim and shoot and come back with a picture that speaks for itself the camera and I. After all, the world still mourns the sacking of the library of Alexandra. What a poor world this would be without ANTIQUITIES.