a chicken in the backyard of a relative's house, photographed with my Kodak Brownie Starflash camera

Camera Start

This essay one of many in my journal entitled Marc: Words and Images.

I was nine years old. I went to bed on Christmas Eve but I woke up in the middle of the night on Christmas Day. Everyone else was still asleep.

I knew it was wrong but opportunity and insatiable curiosity compelled me to do something that I didn’t try hard enough to resist. I got out of bed and went to the living room where the Christmas tree sheltered presents that had been put there a few hours before by my parents, most likely by my mother alone. Underneath the tree were boxes including some with my name on them. I had to see what I had received. I sensed it was a mistake but no one was around.

I grabbed a couple of my presents and quietly took them into the bathroom where I closed the door and turned on the light. Then I carefully opened the boxes. I don’t recall everything but one of the presents was probably clothing such as gloves and a scarf. The second box contained something special. I took off the wrapping and saw it: a Kodak Brownie Starflash camera.

I was fascinated. The camera was unexpected. I hadn’t been especially asking for a camera. Somehow my mother knew it would be a different present and one that would generate unforeseen uses. It quickly became something I was interested in using.

Then the guilt set in. What had I done? I carefully put the presents back in their packaging, left the bathroom and put them back under the tree. I tried to make it look like I hadn’t looked at them.

Nevertheless, I had not waited for morning when everyone would be up and opening presents at the same time. I would need to pretend and act surprised, hiding the reality that I already knew what my presents were. Ultimately, I would be faced with lying, but even if I didn’t have to literally lie, I knew within myself that I had made a mistake and done something terrible.

I was a good kid who always tried to do the right thing but this time I risked potentially letting my mother down. She would be disappointed in me, something that would have made me even more disappointed in myself. Even if I managed to conceal what had happened, my own regret became a punishment I could not escape. I let myself down.

A few hours later, I got up around the time everyone else was up and I went to the tree. I was able to act as though it was a normal Christmas and I was surprised with my gifts. No one seemed to detect anything was wrong. My mother seemed unaware. But I had taught myself an intense, memorable lesson, a horrible result from instant gratification. That Christmas morning simply wasn’t what it should have been. I never forgot it and I never did anything like it again.

Yet somehow, there was still a positive. I had received my very first camera. In the coming days, weeks and years it would capture many scenes. My mother bought black and white film and she paid the cost of developing and printing the pictures at the local Walgreens. In the future, we would run color film through the camera. Many times my mother used the camera, too. It was an asset that wasn’t used solely by me.

Eventually the camera died. Despite my major error, I got to take my first pictures with the Brownie. Thanks to my mother, a lifelong love of photography had begun, with incredible adventures, decades of creative peaks, becoming published over and over again, and capturing amazing moments in the lives of others as well as myself. There is no happier ending.

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