December 24th, 2005
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Something for my grandfather
I have warm thoughts of my grandfather. He died when I was eight years old, less than a year after my grandmother. I can’t imagine what it must be like having the one person you’ve loved since you were a child, pass away. But until he did, we had a lot of wonderful memories: driving to Paul’s Bakery on Sundays to pick up Boston-creme donuts and crullers, or the time that we went to the Spotsylvania Mall and he bought me a Matchbox parking garage/car wash play set, and how when we tried to go home, Little Whitey, his car, wouldn’t start. We had to call a mechanic to tow it to a service station. I got to ride with my grandmother in the tow truck, on a bench seat between her and the driver. I remember vaguely how burly he was; him being a mass of whiskers, denim, and oil. I also recall how every time we went to the mall cafeteria for lunch, I loved sitting in the dark, partitioned, wood panel booths, and picking the vanilla pudding cup with only the most perfect whip cream on top. He would pay me a dollar to pick up twigs in his yard for kindling. I remember how grassless the ground was, under a canopy of old trees, so soft and spongy with moss, like in a fairytale forest. When I was older the one dollar would become five, and grandpa would visit our house to stay with us. I would sit on the orange stepladder chair to make enough seats at the table for five. My dad made a cherry pie for my birthday. I was my grandpa�fs “main man” and my brother was his “cuddly bear”. Unlike probably a lot of grandfathers, we’d play video games together at the computer, mostly Accolade’s EGA classic, Mean 18.
My grandfather was a world traveller, touring Europe with my grandmother on pensioner checks from postal and defense service. This was especially rare as few people on either side of my extended family had been farther than Branson, Missouri, where my great grandpa Bill and Gee-Gee lived. Grandpa and Grandma flew to Norway, the land of our ancestors. They saw Yugoslavia, where my grandmother fell and broke her leg. I received a Bosch-labeled race car and a cardigan from Denmark.
Through all these travels of the early 80s also went my grandfather’s camera, a 1981 Canon A-1, one of the finest made SLR bodies ever created. It’s like the Miyata 1000 of cameras, only not as rare and at the time substantially more expensive. The A-1 featured an in-viewfinder digital readout, five AE modes, and generous exposure compensation, long before such features became common in other SLR bodies. Though the last time I saw them was over twenty years ago, I know that the pictures taken must have been fantastic. When my grandfather passed away, the camera went to my father. And like most of my dad’s wonderful toys, it sat on a shelf to be scarcely used. In high school when I started photography for the sake of take pictures, I used my father’s simple SLR, but in time it because unusable, presumably since it had been dropped in the sea off of the coast of St. Croix on my parents�f honeymoon. So I started using my grandfather’s A-1, though regrettably, like most teenagers I was largely ignorant to the proper maintenance and care that should be afforded to exquisite pieces of technology.
So the A-1 went to the beach, and got smudged lenses, and a handful of shoddily-done polishing jobs with handkerchiefs. So twenty years of neglect and poor use have put my grandfather’s dear companion not in the best of sorts.
However, trying to be more serious about photography, and trying to pay respect to the machine and to my grandfather, yesterday I took the A-1 to the Canon Ginza service center, 7000 miles from where it was bought but less than a hundred from where it was made. In addition to the sand, the smudges, and the mold which have begun to bloom on the lenses, the shutter makes, as the clerk said, a very kanashii (sad) sound from lack of oil. So hopefully I can do a little towards restoring my grandfather’s faith by proper treatment of the equipment from now on. The least I can do is continue on with the tradition of taking pictures and travelling the world.
