Tuesday, April 20, 2010


The door bell rang on Monday afternoon when Rosemary and I were working in the back garden. The man delivering a box for me from Cupertino, California had about given up but Rosemary managed to stop him. She handed me the box. Inside was my new iPhone. It took a while before I was able to find the preliminary instruction booklet which was hidden under some beautifully designed black packaging which whose purpose seemed to prevent me from finding its contents. I located a funny looking credit card and I almost missed a little paper-clip looking little metal piece. I scanned the Telus instructions and had no idea what a sim card was.

I was overwhelmed.

At 2 P.M. 2pm Paul Leisz showed up at the front door and he told me, “Let’s get your iPhone working.” Having no faith in my ability to figure out anything more complicated than calculation depth of field charts and correct transparency exposures he dispatched me to make tea. Feeling a bit on the guilty side I decided that I needed to feed him. Since Rosemary was due at any moment I cooked up a very good emmentaler omelet and accompanied it with maple syrup brown beans. I did serve tea later as we had a fresh strawberry drink made with the blender.

Within an hour my iPhone was in working order. It will take me a while to remember not to press on icons and to tap on them. It will take me a while to figure out how to organize my photographs in some sort of orderly file system.

After all, my iPhone is not going to be an iPod. I am not going to use it to help me locate the nearest pizza joint to Scott Road and 237 Avenue. I will not use it to check my stocks. I don’t own any. I will not read the NY Times on it since I get it as hard copy at the front door. My iPhone (for the time being?) will be a phone and a wallet with wallet sized pictures of my grandchildren. I have never ever carried photographs of my family in my wallet.

I have always had a dislike of people who subjected me to pictures (usually terrible) of, “This is my cute Tracy.” These kinds of people were very much like my friend Les Wiseman’s brother who used to work on a BC Ferry. He would often visit his cooler brother at Vancouver Magazine and when I would spot him carrying his briefcase I would try to hide. In that briefcase he would pull out cartoons and jokes cut out from newspapers. He never did show me the pictures in his wallet but I am sure he had many.

The pictures of my granddaughters in my iPhone will share space with sample pictures of the stuff I have done for so many years. For whatever is worth my new gadget will be a small portable portfolio. I just might convince someone to give me a photo job.

Perhaps the whole effort (even though it does use an iPhone) is by now old-fashioned. The new breed of photo-carrying-in-my-wallet person would never do this sort of thing. They would say to me, “Check out my pictures in Flickr and look at the stuff I have in Facebook. Do you do facebook?”

I don’t do facebook. My doppelgänger, Jorge de Irureta Goyena does.

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