It’s in my head, not on my phone, and after 50 years it’s lost some of the surrounding detail. I have a memory of that incident, more precious now that he has been canonized. This was before the age of cellphones, so I did the old-fashioned thing: I shook the pope’s hand. I managed to get away from my parents and up to the wooden barrier where the pope was standing. Peter’s in Rome, and there was a large crowd. When I was just the age of the girl at the nunciature, my family had an audience with Pope Paul VI. There’s something out of order about this. She was holding up her cellphone, shaking her hair and recording herself cheering into the phone. When her husband engineered the crucial touchdown, the television cameras focused on her. The Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, is married to a famous model, Gisele Bündchen, and she naturally had a luxury box. When the New England Patriots staged their memorable comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI, Fox TV showed a similar incident. Instead of shaking the pope’s hand, she did what many young people would do: She turned her back on him, held up her phone and took a selfie of herself and the Holy Father looking at the phone. On the way in, he stopped to shake some hands, including that of a teenage girl standing next to me. When Pope Francis visited Washington in 2015, I attended an event for him at the nuncio’s residence. This is a strange idea, “making memories.” But it exactly describes the way many of us go about living our lives. I can choose tunes that are “Gentle,” “Chill,” “Epic,” “Dreamy,” etc. It mashes random pictures together and sets them to music. My iPhone has, under its Photos icon, a Memories section that undertakes to do this for me. I saw an ad on the television recently that encouraged the observer to start “making memories” with the device on offer, probably a phone of some kind.
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