My Camera is Broken. Again.

Christ, these Canon G9s are delicate flowers. This is the third time this camera has broken. Buying a new camera costs more money so every time this happens I make the decision to repair it, and I should get a new camera already but the truth is I kinda love the damn thing. The techs don’t work weekends at my repair place, which means no one is going to even look at it until Monday.

I take pictures every day! How am I going to survive??

The statue of the Virgin Mary pictured below is a casualty from the Paring Down Process that is integral to my annual Spring Cleaning. Every year I have to get rid of a certain amount of stuff or my apartment starts to feel uncomfortably cluttered. We’ve been through a lot together though, Mary and me. Someone else had gotten rid of her roughly 36 years ago, when I found her and picked her up off the streets of Cambridge, MA, where I was going to school. Since then I’ve been carting her from place to place every time I’ve moved. She’s survived college, grad school, marriage, divorce, countless jobs, starting a business, five books, I could go on.

She was an interesting conversation piece too, because I’m not religious. “So, what are you doing with a statue of the Virgin Mary,” people would ask. I was raised catholic, I’d explain. I don’t believe but I still take comfort in and enjoy the beauty of religious iconography. But Mary has been falling apart for a while now, and leaves a pile of plaster dust wherever she sits.

Usually when I put something down on the street it’s gone within ten minutes. Mary was still around when I came back hours later. Thankfully, by the next day someone had decided they wanted her. I hope. Maybe the building super out her in the garbage. But I am going to chose to believe someone took her home.