Ben-Hur Hates Lepers

I don't get what the big deal is about leprosy.  Either that, or maybe society is as image conscious as I hope it isn't, or leprosy is much worse than I think.  Fact is, I've never seen a leper.  I've never been to Molokai Island, and the Leprosy diseased people in this flick were always wearing too many clothes and hiding in the shadows to get a good look, not to mention it's 1959 and make-up artists probably didn't have the means to do it right as they could today.   I guess what I'm asking for is a movie called, "Attack of the Lepers" or something, so I can gawk.

Getting that nonsense out of the way, if my family members contracted this disease, I wouldn't want them hiding in caves or going to some remote island, I mean, it's basically a bad skin disease, worse than a rash, better than AIDS.  I was shocked to learn Judah was such a jerk that he cast his mom and his sister off to some cave because he didn't want to look at them ... wait ... that's not how it went down?  Of course not.  Judah was perfect.

The ladies went to the Leper Cave because they wanted Judah to remember them as they were.  Could you imagine spelunking and coming across a leper cave?  Yikes.  Of all the things to fear in caves, bears, snakes, spiders, fools gold, bottomless pits, Al-Qaeda, and undiscovered monsters, what if you stumbled upon a Leper colony?  That would be freakier than stumbling upon a colony of Little People I imagine.  

I'm having a tough time staying serious here, but the lesson I'm trying to reach is "Remembering People as They Are" which occurs when something happens to a loved one, and you know things will never be the same again.  Of course they're a loved one, and you do everything you can to help them through the bad times, but it sucks because you create all these awful new memories that erase so many of the wonderful memories.   Instead of remembering your dad take you to a Whalers game, that memory gets erased with trying to carry his brain cancer ridden body into a men's bathroom stall so he can drop a deuce with as little shame as possible for not being able to do it on his own.  It's brutal, but what the fuck can you do about it?  

This is where pictures come in handy.  Pictures are strange because they seem to re-create memories of events.  After awhile, most memories fade but you go back and look at a photo album and those pictures turn into your memories, so you don't have particular memories anymore, just memories of pictures.  This is a big reason I've never owned a camera, because I LOVE my pure memories.  A picture can't capture my mom singing me to sleep as a toddler with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."  It can't capture the party my parents had when the United States won the Miracle on Ice.  

What pictures can do though is destroy the bad memories.  Let's say you have a memory of a loved one in a wheelchair at the casino, and they're so mentally disabled that they can't negotiate the quarters into the slots, and they keep missing by a foot and get rejected by the neighboring machine.  Maybe if your family has pictures of you having your 6th birthday party when all the kids decided to run around naked, that fond memory can kill the awful ones you don't have pictures of.  

So basically, maybe it's time for me to re-think getting a camera.