The Back-up

A couple of months ago, I had some problems with the hard drive of my Ibook. Luckily, our good friend Greg, who, like me, loves Macs, helped me repair the corrupted software.

I keep a separate hard drive to back up pictures, music, etc. My music got backed up through my ipod. To my horror, looking at the back-up hard drive, I came to the realization that I hadn't backed up the digital pictures from my Canon digital camera to the back-up hard drive since May. I'd downloaded them to the laptop, meaning to move them to the back-up hard drive.

This meant that except for his first couple of games of the season, I'd lost all the pictures from my son's previous baseball season. This was distressing for a couple of reasons; first, his team had gone all the way to the World Series of their league, something that had been his goal since he started playing baseball as a little boy. The second reason it was distressing was that it was his last season. Since he'd attained his goal, to play in a championship, and was now busy with high school, marching band, etc., that season was to be his last.



I still had a half-dozen videotapes taken with my camcorder, and I comforted myself with that, but it was cold comfort. Then it occurred to me-- my ex had been taking pictures all season with her brand new digital camera.

I remembered all the acrimony of the past-- a custody fight that was beyond bitter. I remembered heeding my old friend Tas' words-- a friend who had dealt with the bitter split of her parents, who implored me not to rise to my ex's bait-- not to badmouth my ex, no matter how awful she acted. I recalled all the years of helping my ex out when she needed, slowly, methodically creating goodwill-- help moving, advice when she was having problems, financial help occasionally-- that slowly ended the conflict. As we approach the end of my son's childhood, things are calm, friendly even.



I called her up, told her about my hard drive mishap, and the loss, and asked her if I could give her a blank cd and have her give me copies of the pictures she took.

No problem, she said.



I remembered every time I had to bite my lip when she said something mean or ridiculous. Every time my son complained about her, and I had to tell him that there was nothing I could do about it-- that he'd have to work it out with her. I remembered every time I turned the other cheek. Every time I was the adult in the situation.

As I loaded the cd and looked at the pictures of a wonderful season, a season in which he had a coach who took him out of the doldrums of right field and let him play first base, third base-- and even pitch, including in a World Series-- I realized that it was all worth it.