How it all started (Part 2)

 

            In our last episode, I recounted a bit of my father being the family shutterbug, and now it’s time to elaborate. I didn’t have very much time with my father growing up, for two big reasons. Firstly, my father was the top salesman for a company called Prestolite. Once upon a time, the ignition system in cars used some sort of alchemy called “points” which was replaced by an electronic ignition system, that these guys invented. (“Presto… lite!” featured prominently in their marketing.) Well, back in the days before Al Gore invented the internet, being a top salesman meant traveling. A lot of traveling, on the order of leaving Monday morning and getting home Friday afternoon. He would mostly drive and sometimes fly off to exotic locales like Toledo and Louisville, and always had stories and, without fail around the end of June, he could be counted on to have some questionably legal fireworks in the trunk of his car.

 

            The other reason I didn’t get much time with my dad was because he had a bum ticker like most of the men on his side of the family and that a possible heart attack, of which he at least had one in my young memory, wasn’t any reason to bother a doctor. The reason that fireworks stick out so prominently in my memory was because he had left for his last business trip with promises of another beautiful, slightly dangerous display when he got back. He died alone in a hotel room on July 1^st, in New Jersey of all places, just one day after his 30^th wedding anniversary, the summer before my 10^th birthday.

 

            Shortly before all that happened however, something else occurred.  My father was never one to spend an exorbitant amount of money on his hobby. That being said, if there was a new-fangled camera out there that he could justify to my mom, dad usually ended up with one. His last camera was a very fancy Minolta 110 that he liked because he could carry it everywhere. He also bought (to his and a lot of people’s regret) one of the first Kodak instant cameras, before Polaroid sued the pants off of them. As he was going through and weeding out some of his older collection, a cast-off was about to come into my possession. Not that I was ready to appreciate it…

 

I have owned, used, and seen many cameras in my day that I would unhesitatingly call beautiful; in the beauty pageant of cameras, this utilitarian brick would be lucky to bring home Miss Congeniality. The Brownie Super 27, this hand-me down from my dad, had just become my first camera. Not that the single-digit-year-old was going to be trusted with film, mind you, but it could be something I could play with instead of gathering dust on a shelf.

 

The first thing I was taken with was the small lever on the center front that swung open a large panel, with a shiny circular depression underneath. Being a kid whose kindergarten picture was taken in a Star Trek t-shirt, this was very reminiscent of Captain Kirk flipping open his communicator and thus, very cool to play with. Anyway, if you had tried to explain flashbulbs to me, I would probably neither have understood nor cared very much. I eventually got to playing with all the knobs and buttons and looking through it properly. I figured out the shutter button didn’t do much, until you ratcheted the knob next to it until it stopped, then the shutter rewarded me with a satisfying click. At that point, I could pretend to take pictures quite realistically, which I assume tickled my dad quite a bit.

 

I never took any actual pictures with this camera, but that didn’t matter. It did not hold up well under the tender mercies of a little boy who saw it as more of a toy than a tool, and by the time I got into photography for real, 127 film was well on it’s way to extinction. My first 35mm camera I ever had was a cheap little Ansco compact I got to take on my school exchange program to Germany. My first SLR was a Pentax K1000 I bought (like so many other school kids) to take my first photography class. My first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 300, an ungainly thing that was trying to be the combination of a PDA and a camera, at a glorious 640x480 resolution.

 

But none of those were my first camera. My first camera was an ugly brick I never shot a frame of film with, and only ever used to have Scotty beam me up. It also let me pretend to be just like a grownup and more importantly, just like my dad. Did that set me on the path that led me to being a photographer? Who knows? At this point in time, my long-term goal still was to go to Hollywood when I grew up and be a stunt man in the movies, so I can’t really say that this set me on the path. It probably gave me a little nudge though, and sometimes those little nudges make all the difference.

How it all started (Part 1)

 

It was a beautiful Washington D.C. summer day in the mid-1970’s. Even better, it was a Saturday; that meant Dad wasn’t away on some business trip and Mom was going to engage in her favorite Saturday activity: garage sales. That wasn’t even the best part; in the past week, I had performed some service above and beyond the expectations of kid-dom and I had not just a coin but several coins, clinking musically together in the pocket of my shorts. Garage sales were usually a careful mix of being good and begging for parental largesse; not today. Today I had My Own Money.

 

I was very quiet in the back seat of the car, which was no doubt appreciated. As a quite late in life child of two Great Depression-born parents, the concept of “seen and not heard” was firmly enforced into the next generation. I was no problem today; thoughts had to be thought and considerations considered very carefully. This was My Own Money after all. Two or maybe three garage sales went by, with no luck. I wasn’t going to jump at the first opportunity, after all; no sir.  I could be broke when the real treasure showed itself.

 

I needn’t have worried. The next sale we went to, I made a beeline for the toys, as was usual, and there it sat: a very odd contraption, but obviously thought of as a toy by the family having the sale. It was black, and had two sticking-out bits, almost like it wanted to be binoculars, but was blunted at the other end. Still, the shape of it seemed like it wanted me to look through it, so I did. I tell you, five (maybe six) year old me wasn’t ready for what he saw.

 

It was a cowboy, dressed all in black. However, it wasn’t just the image of the cowboy; it was how real the cowboy looked, like he was standing right there in front of me. Further inspection of the gadget revealed a little brass knob on the right-hand side, and when pulled down and released, a different image appeared. The same cowboy was there, but now with a stunning white horse. Another pull and click, and the cowboy was firing his six-shooter. A total of seven different images appeared before they repeated. Pulling it away from my face, I looked at the little round yellow price sticker on the bottom and, for the princely sum of twenty-five cents, that device was coming home with me.

 

Later on at home, I gave my new prize a much more thorough inspection. I noticed that a cardboard piece at the top rotated as the brass button was pushed. I gave it a very hesitant tug, and it pulled free. Now my Mom, having passed on her love of reading as soon as we could hold books, I could make out a few of the words on the reel, but most of it needed explaining. Turns out I was holding View-Master reel number 955, Hopalong Cassidy and “Topper”. I had no idea how much 955 was exactly, but I knew that meant there were a lot more of those reels to find.

 

 

In hindsight, it was a View-Master Model C viewer that I bought and it, and the reel that came in it, were the very first of many that I would come to collect over the course of my life. However, it was only a tangential hobby of mine until it intersected with my life and career in a much more definitive way. You see, I inherited my love of photography from my Dad, and it was exactly that, for the both of us. He had his job that paid the bills, but he was the family shutterbug and that was what he truly enjoyed. I’d be lying if I said what he instilled in me didn’t affect my career choice. I was well into adulthood when I discovered that there was a thriving community of people who were not only collectors but also photographers who created their own stereo (“3D”) images. I have since acquired all sorts of equipment, both film and, as of late, digital that allows me to create my own stereo images. I even got my hands on a View-Master Personal camera and the film cutter that goes with it that allows me to produce my very own View-Master reels.

 

The community of which I mentioned also turned out to be a much more organized affair, the National Stereoscopic Association, based right here in Portland, Oregon (coincidentally the home of the late, great Sawyer’s Inc., the company behind the origin of View-Master) with a published magazine and annual conventions. I can’t travel much, so I don’t make it to the conventions, but I cherish reading the news and history every other month and take solace in the fact that there are so many people with the same unusual hobby as me.

 

Fun fact for you: our UK counterpart, the London Stereographic Society, has Sir Brian May as it’s president. Yes, That Brian May; apparently reading for a doctorate in astrophysics as well as being the lead guitarist of the band Queen still left him with entirely too much free time on his hands and he took up 3D photography as well. He not only is an avid photographer but also designed the OWL, a stereo print viewer. When I feel like I don’t have the strength or the ambition to go out and take pictures, the man literally shames me from afar.

 

Almost half a century later, now wheelchair bound and with my world traveling days firmly in the past, I can still open one of the boxes of my collection and stand on the sands of Egypt marveling at the pyramids. I can explore the wonders of Yellowstone or any of the other American National Parks, whose souvenir shops that provided so much of View-Master’s bread and butter throughout it’s first couple of decades. Recently, the passing of Queen Elizabeth II had me pulling out the reels to experience her long-ago Coronation just as if I had really been right there. I have all of these places at my fingertips and my fascination, nay obsession, all began with a quarter and a movie cowboy one sparkling Saturday in the 1970’s.

 

 

It’s just a bed.

 

The saga of the leaky ceiling had finally come to an end. In the long-ago days of this past summer, the external portion of the roof had been fixed but internally, the kids’ room was a hot mess. Eventually, a contractor was secured and he finished his task this week. The ceiling was better than new with nary a sag or hint of the mold that had forced the kids to camp out in the living room on couches for months. The time had come to move things back in and set it up for habitation again. The mother-in-law, naturally, took charge of proceedings; it is her house, after all, and there was always a terrible chance that things might go smoothly and stress-free.

Assembling Henry’s bed was straightforward, once all the pieces were finally located. The problem was Ewan’s bed or, more to the point, the lack thereof. You see, he decided a while back that he almost immediately regretted: he bought his buddy’s futon. In the act of getting rid of a perfectly serviceable bed to replace it with a combination of a substandard bed AND a mediocre couch, he had done himself quite a mischief. Luckily, we still had a bedframe and a box spring floating around; we just needed a mattress. Fortunately, I had a solution to that problem too…

I rolled into my room and began pulling down the top layers of a mountain. Two years’ worth of collected “I’ll sort that stuff someday”, “I’ll decide later if I even want to keep that”, and “When I make some room in the closet, I’ll hang that up”. When they make procrastination into an organized religion, I will be a high priest. After much tossing and flinging (mostly on to my own bed), I got to the layer I dreaded reaching. A pristinely made bed, topped off with a gaudy Christmas-themed fleece. Let me back up a bit… This is the bed of my wife, Cyndi. This was her bed from the day we moved to Oregon in 2015. This is the bed she slept in, spent most of her days in, and laid in while I gave her the countless dialysis treatments she endured, every single night for over seven years. This was the bed she laid in when I began to notice the awful red welts forming on her stomach and right breast, where I hoped she didn’t have cancer, and where she was when I found out she had something much, much worse…

I came home from Hospice House in Bend as a newly-minted widower on December 27^th, 2022 and did one of my maddest acts in a long list of denials: I completely stripped Cyndi’s bed and washed everything down to the last sheet and pillowcase. I remade her bed, fresh and spotless, and topped it off with the aforementioned Christmas fleece she so loved. A perfect bed, all ready for her, as if she was going to walk in the door any minute. Or ever again.

Let’s go back to the present. I’m in my disaster of a bedroom staring at a bed still waiting for it’s missing occupant, and I need to undo the bedding so Ewan can carry the mattress to his room. But I can’t. I just can’t do it, because the undoing of my work of almost two years ago is giving in to the fact that she is truly never going to sleep in this bed again. A brief emotional collapse later (and after being checked in on concernedly by both kids), I did it. Of course, I did, because if it were possible to hear her voice from what lies beyond, Cyndi would tell me that I have to do what’s best for our children, even though I have to do it alone now, even if it means moving on just a tiny bit.

So now, I’ve done what I needed to do: I have been at the verge of tears all day, but my children have proper places to sleep. I now have the mattress from the world’s worst futon piled on top of the box spring of Cyndi’s bed, and I have begun rebuilding the temple to the gods of procrastination on top of it. Because I can always sort that stuff out later.

 

And after all, it’s just a bed.