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My dad’s basement has steel shelving on the south wall, the west wall, and the north wall. The shelves rise from the floor to nearly the joists above and are loaded mostly with poorly labeled cardboard boxes containing trash and treasures accumulated in a succession of homes over seven decades. A couple of days ago, I discovered on the north wall, at my eye level, and thus, I would have thought, in plain view, a bright yellow box denominated “Brownie Holiday Flash Outfit.” It had somehow escaped my notice on many other searches for trash and treasures.
The yellow box was crushed beneath other boxes, but I pried it free and recognized my mother’s scrawl on one of the narrow ends of the box, in black grease pencil, “Buddy’s Birthday gift, 1957.” Indeed, inside, was my very first camera, something I had requested when I turned eight and was offered the choice of a bicycle or a camera. This Brownie was a cube-shaped non-adjustable Kodak camera constructed of Bakelite now grown brittle. When I gently checked to see whether it still had film in it, the camera body broke apart into several ragged pieces. The take-up spool was empty.
Now, you might imagine that I, a hoarder like my parents, would feel a swelling of sentimentalism, a buoyant pleasure, in my taking possession of this archaeological artifact. But, no, actually, I did not. What I felt was resentment towards Eastman Kodak for marketing such a crappy little camera. I recalled how disappointed I was when I recently found, also in Dad’s basement, two black-and-white photos that young Buddy had taken with that camera, an insufficiently sharp portrait of my sister in 1958 and an even less sharp depiction of an erupting volcano in 1960.
“’Tis a poor workman who blames his tools,” my grandma used to insist, but, oh, if only Kodak had given that Brownie a little better lens!
♦
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