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we’re talking about, not me. They captured the moment—they just can’t remember where they put it.
    A YEAR OR TWO AGO, I actually dug into the thousand million hours of home videos we’d accumulated over the years and decided to make a “greatest hits” video for my wife for Mother’s Day. I spent weeks and weeks clandestinely selecting and editing video clips and finding just-the-right songs to go with it (because there’s a fine line between getting someone a little teary-eyed and putting them in the hospital). When it was all done, I’m going to be honest with you: It came out pretty darn well. She loved it as much as I knew she would.
    Though above and beyond the joy of watching her watch it (which was enough of a reward for me, frankly), I also had the singular experience of having sifted through all that stuff to begin with. Literally thousands of hours of video that included—but was not limited to: virtually every hour of the first six months of each of our children’s lives, every birthday party, every holiday, every visit, every vacation, every new pair of pants my boys tried on—you name it, we had it recorded, labeled, and somewhere in a shoebox. But until I decided to make that video I had never looked at any of it. Other than when I shot it and wanted to check that the battery was working, I had never seen this stuff. And as dull as 99 percent of it is—sorting through the out-of-focus, blurry, herky-jerky parts, and the long patches where you were unaware the camera was running and unintentionally recorded hours on end of your own thigh—when you get past that, there is indeed spectacular treasure to be mined.
    ONE DAY we were trying to clean out a packed-to-the-rafters closet at home and we came across an old box of photos. Some from the recent past—my kids as infants, toddlers, preschoolers—and some from life before they were here. The early years of our marriage. And the years leading up to that; the dating, the single years, our college years, our own childhood birthday parties. Boy, did our kids love looking through those pictures! Making fun of our bad haircuts and horrendous fashion choices, how undeniably corny we look waving and posing everywhere, how clichéd our family get-togethers look on camera—like Norman Rockwell if his family overate and squabbled and hated being photographed.
    The hour or so that we sat on the floor of that closet—a full family doing something as organic, unforced, and joyful as going through family pictures and telling the stories—was one of the sweetest times I can recall ever spending. The sorting through memorialized golden moments was becoming itself a new golden moment. One that should probably itself be memorialized.
    As I stood to get my camera—to get a photo of my family looking at photos—my wife and children turned to me with a collective look of disappointment. In the heartbeat that it took to register the look, I sensed that it wasn’t the usual irritated “Daaadd, wouldya cut it out!” It wasn’t a response of annoyance. It was something deeper, and more generous. This was them appealing to me for my benefit. This was “Why would you get up and leave this when this is so wonderfully perfect?”
    And they were right; sometimes it is better to leave the tender moment alone.

The Car Door Ding
    I wouldn’t say I’m a great driver. I’m certainly a very safe driver—just not particularly good. For example, I tend to park by sound . I use the sound of me hitting something to indicate it’s now time to go the other way. Those cement things that you’re supposed to stop in front of? I stop on them. “Plenty of room, plenty of room, plenty of room—BOOM—okay, no more room.”
    So, consequently, my car always has an impressive array of scrapes, dings, scratches, and plastic things dangling unattractively. And I never