As the days passed, the snow began to melt, and I traversed the property with a shovel looking for it. I dug every path I could have possibly walked, but still, no camera. Finally, I sent Doug on a mission to buy me a new one. This is what he came back with.
“What the hell?” I demanded. “I ask for Sony, and you come back with Fisher-Price?”
“Look, it was made just for you!” he said excitedly. “It’s ‘kid tough.’ It’s ‘built to survive drop, after drop, after drop.’ It’s got a swiveling lens, big buttons and child-friendly controls. Best of all, it’s waterproof!”
“It plays ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ every time I take a picture,” I protested.
But even as I spoke, I knew I had no right to be indignant. This summer, I left my Sony, with a memory card filled with three hundred pictures, out in the rain. A month later, the same fate befell our video camera, which contained footage of the birth of Anna and Eva’s first tottering steps.
To add insult to injury, while shopping for cameras, Doug bought the Sony for himself. When the representative in the photo department at Walmart offered him a service plan, he responded, “No…but can I have a service plan on my wife?”
A friend of ours came over last week and took his dog out to our backyard. Within the first two minutes, he looked down and asked, “Did you lose something?” There was my camera, glistening and facedown in a frozen snowdrift. After a quick recharging of the battery…it worked!
The first shot I took? Tyler and Eva’s new camera, soon to be wrapped up for Christmas. But first, the batteries are dead, and there’s one little glitch. I can’t figure out how to open it.