I Found An Old Polaroid Camera

ROCHESTER, New York- I like cameras. I’m from Rochester, they’re in my blood. Well, I decided to clean my room at my parents’ house. For some reason they gave me a room there when they moved to Rochester after leaving the house that I grew up at in Albion. I took it.

I now need a place where I can stash the camera gear that I don’t want to carry with me on some of my travels. I have too much now and I need to pick and choose what I actually carry. I also kind of wanted to display it all … as decoration, perhaps.

So I cleaned up the room. For the better part of a decade moving boxes of my stuff from the old house were still laying all over the floor. I never bothered to do anything with them, as my visits to Rochester have tended to always be pretty brief. But now I had a reason …

So I dug into everything, through out the junk, and dug through the ruins of my childhood. It was funny — a pile of old songs that I wrote as a teenager, some old girlfriend’s crusty old undies, my giant box of football cards, love letters, my arsenal of firearms, and the stack of notebooks that I would write about my travels in before I began blogging in 2005.

Then I found an old Polaroid camera. I had already cleared out a shelf for my camera archives — all of my old cameras that I no longer use — and I set it up there not thinking too much about it.

Then I looked at it again. What if it still works?

No way. This thing has been sitting, untouched, for at least 20 years. There is no way that it still works. But I figured that I would try nonetheless.

I lifted up the flash and — what the fuck?!? — the little green ‘on’ light came on. It appeared as if the thing not only still turned on after sitting around for decades but could still work. No way.

So my wife and kids bought me some Polaroid film for my birthday.

It worked.