the definitive moment

Yes, I love yarn and knitting and color and texture. But today I'm excited because I received my new camera, a Canon S90. I'm a camera nut. And this one has so much in it's little body. It can go totally manual (remember 35mm aperture and shutter speeds?) or levels of automatic. Canon is so clever. They know that there are many digital camera lovers out there who fondly remember (and even now and then long for) last century's 35mm technology.  The feel of gently turning the lens to focus, the anarchistic ability to create your own settings against all photography rules. Of course, most of us do not lament the expense of shooting dozens of pictures and perhaps finding, after they've been developed, that only one or two are marginally noteworthy. I love the instantaneous nature of digital and the ability to edit and delete right in the camera! While this S90 is not exactly a DSLR, it comes awfully close. And for those of us who do not, or cannot, spend $3,000 plus and want a compact camera that does it all (me) this one fits the bill. I look forward to always having it with me and in the style of Cartier-Bresson, catching the definitive moment.
     I tried to channel Henri last year in Paris for a few days. I sat in the Jardin Luxembourg, near the sailboat pond on a Sunday morning that just happened to be the first day of summer and simply snapped picture after picture in black and white. A boy in a striped shirt kept appearing. At first he ran around the pond on foot then sped by often on  his bicycle. He was caught in frame after frame - sometimes entering, sometimes leaving.

There was an attractive older couple who strolled back and forth - she wore designer print stockings and her legs were veritable abstract expressionist canvases (very cool). At some point, she sat at the edge of the pond and asked her companion to take her picture. As he set up the camera, she burst into song, her arms outstretched in a gesture of joie de vivre. Maybe they were only American tourists like us - amazed to be in Paris that day, but that brief moment became a part of my witnessing. Certainly a definitive moment in time. Time that has passed as the second first day of summer since then closes in on me and my camera.

This quote from Paul Valery seems appropriate at this point.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, 
a metaphor for proof, a torrent of verbiage 
for a spring of capital truths, 
and oneself for an orator, 
is inborn in us.