Ever since I was a kid I have loved communicating with people. My cousins and I would prank call people whenever we were at my Grandma’s house (long before the days of caller ID) and my friends and I loved getting on my dad’s CB radio and trying to get truckers to meet us at a nearby 7-11. We never actually met the truckers, we’d just ride our bikes there, buy a piña colada Slurpee, and hide across the street to see if they would show. Some did, some didn’t.
As I’ve gotten older and technology has advanced, I have graduated from the Kodak Tele Disc camera and the Motorola pager to Canon Powershot cameras and Motorola smartphones. You’ll notice the latter two are plural. Like my Tele Disc, which my friend accidentally drove over, my most recent cameras have been involved in an incident or two. For example, wine. A year or two ago I had my camera with me at a party. The safety strap was around my wrist – per Maverik Midget King’s advice – which put it in the perfect location for landing in my Dixie cup of wine. Like so many who consume too much alcohol, my camera had great difficulty operating in a functional manner after that incident.
I replaced it with the exact same camera and began doing what I always do – taking it with me everywhere; throwing it in my bag, sans case; taking pictures of anything and everything; dropping it occasionally; and, the favorite, putting it on make-shift tripods for ‘continuous’ shots. As had happened with previous point-and-shoots, my zoom feature was starting to stick and the quality of the photos on which zoom was used was lacking. Not one to easily give up, I continued to use the camera.
Sadly, while On My Terms and I were on our 20th set of three continuous shots of us doing karaoke, my camera experienced a terrible fall. We had just placed it on top of the flat screen TV tripod and pressed the continuous timer when it teetered off the top of the TV and landed lens down on the ground. I ran toward it, but it was too late. The lens was stuck in a dented outward position. “What are you going do do without a camera?” On My Terms asked. “I’ll have to do what I did at the David Sedaris book reading – sketch the event,” I replied.
With so many important events around the corner, specifically, National Corndog Day, I really need to replace my camera. I was sharing this information with Not So Little Man and he asked, “What good are you without your camera?” He was right. I have been documenting things for years and cameras have been my most consistent medium. “It’s like not having a voice,” I told Not So Little Man. “Well, a picture is worth a thousand words,” he quipped.