Luke said something totally hilarious over the Christmas holidays. Sadly for him, it wasn’t a dad joke he found on Reddit. He looked at me one day and said, in all seriousness, “Let’s clean out the storage room on Saturday.”
It took a moment for me to realize he actually thought this gargantuan job could be accomplished in a day. I’ll be impressed if we get it done in a month. Or ever. But the perpetually thwarted minimalist in me realized I finally had a chance, no matter the scope, so I grabbed on for dear life. By the time he got home that night, I had emptied all of our stored belongings into our already cramped rec room. The job was officially underway.
We’ve tried this a few times before. Maybe it’s more that I have tried it a few times before. I always reach a breaking point at which I pack everything up again and put it right back where I found it. Sure, we’re a few books lighter and I’ve finally summoned the courage to toss an old memento, but I’m still re-shelving a decade's worth of snapshots (the physical ones), boxes of baby clothes and the Cabbage Patch Kid I got when I was eight. My kids don’t want to play with that thing, so I guess I’m holding out hope that a grandchild might someday find it historically intriguing.
The interesting thing about this process is that it’s so different from organizing or purging any other room in the house. This is the room that’s sole purpose is to house things that don’t have much use. It’s not like organizing a cutlery drawer or a back hall closet. You’re essentially deciding where to put things you never want to use but for some reason still want to keep.
Among the crowd of boxes, I found a collection of formerly impressive camera equipment. I’ve seen this box before, on each of the previous purge attempts. In it lies an old film camera and two early model DSLRs. I’ve tried to Kijiji this stuff before, with no success, clearly before film photography started making a comeback. I tell you, that is not a bandwagon I want to jump onto anytime soon. I can’t imagine the forethought and skill required for a film photograph, let alone having to get the damn roll developed. Any hobby that adds frequent, inconvenient errands to my list of things to do gets quickly punted into the “maybe when the kids move out” column.
However, I did see a glimmer of hope amongst the other goodies stashed away in there. It was my first DLSR, the Canon Rebel XT. I remember thinking that thing was so cool back when I got it. And that’s when I was still shooting everything in auto. I had absolutely no clue how to do anything other than point and shoot. The only thing I had going for me was composition but even that’s a stretch when you don’t know how to override the built-in flash.
I took it out of the storage box. It is so gloriously light. Camera and lens put together is like a feather compared to the mammoth I’m using these days. And all of a sudden, it came to me. I was talking last time about how the boy has been suffering through a period of boredom, which may well be misdirected frustration at not having something to call his own. This camera is the perfect size for his little hands. I decided to let him give photography a shot.
The purist in me wants to teach him the exposure triangle, the rule of thirds and the dangers of backlighting, but if you’ll recall, part of the challenge recently has been a lack of time on everyone else’s part. So, for now, he’s just playing around on auto. Needless to say, the flash is getting a lot of action.
It’s funny, though. It didn’t occur to me that putting a camera in the hands of a boy who craves my company would result in me often being the subject of his new hobby. My how the tables have turned. What’s more, his contrasty, hard light shots remind me so much of our youth, when we took pictures to capture moments of hilarity and gregariousness. That was before I got all artsy and intentional.
I think of myself as being a family historian, a documentarian of their youth and who they are in their millisecond of childhood. But I have it all wrong. He is the one capturing us as our true selves, snapping shots of our busy, unmanicured life, aiming for nothing more than a memory frozen in time.