2/8/10 Two photographs (and, by extension, a film canister), recycled
Isn't it amazing that I lead a life of such plenty that I hold onto items that have little or no value and, indeed, I have no interest in.
Examples abound, but here's the latest one.
I've apparently owned a random roll of film, about which I couldn't care less, for about nine years. I say "apparently" because I really have little recollection of this roll of film. I have vague memories of seeing it in the back of a drawer from time to time, but it basically became invisible.
Think about that: I own things that I can ignore. How many of the world's people can say that? What percentage of our earth's population has so much stuff that they can afford to neither fully know what some of it is nor care about much of it. I find it in one sense odd and, at another extreme, rather obscene.
At any rate, I could well have let that roll of film bounce around in my desk drawer for many more years and would undoubtedly have packed it up and moved it to our next house, just as I moved it here when I came from New York.
Thankfully, the Downsize Challenge continues to open my eyes, and I realized that it was time to deal with that roll. Last week I took it to the local Rite Aid to be developed. It's been so long since I dropped off film at a drug store that I needed to ask the lady for help in filling out the envelope.
Honestly, as the time approached to pick up the film, I started to have a little anxiety about what I was going to find. I could hardly remember owning a 35mm camera, and I certainly couldn't put my finger on what I might have photographed with it. Especially given that I didn't have it developed at the time. Very strange.
I picked it up with Joanna and Chase in the car and, to be frank, was glad that the little guy prevented Joanna from coming into the store with me. At least I'd get a look at the photos on my own first, with the opportunity to ditch anything incriminating before she saw them.
Hey, I was once a wild and crazy guy.
The result turned out to be both more strange and more mundane than anything I could have imagined.
Only two shots. One, dark and grainy (clearly the flash didn't go off) of me putting on a bike helmet in the hallway of Joanna's Harlem apartment. The other, of Joanna in front of a bridge somewhere in Brooklyn. We think it's Brooklyn, although that's not the Brooklyn Bridge.
The pictures are clearly from a Five Borough New York City bike tour we did sometime around the summer of 2001.
Questions abound. Why did we only take these two pictures? Why take 35mm pictures at all, since I had my digital camera by then? Why didn't I develop the film when I took it out of the camera? What in the heck ever happened to the camera?
From a downsizing perspective, the most significant question is also the easiest to answer.
Should I have so much stuff that some of it becomes invisible filler, just occupying air in a symbolic celebration of excess?
The answer, of course, is no. Good riddance.
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