Slides 1 and 38

         
The Slide: My mother smiles for the first picture ever taken on the new camera.
The Date: 1963
The Photographer: Mr. Blumenthal 


My mother is wearing a soft beige camel hair coat. She’s standing in Blumenthal’s Camera and Sporting Goods in Olean, NY. She crossed the state line earlier that afternoon and drove twenty-five miles on this winter day to buy a new Argus C3 Range Finder 35 mm camera. It wasn’t expensive but it was more than she and dad could afford. Nevertheless my mother came to buy the camera because my baby sister’s first year had gone largely unphotographed and this was unacceptable.
My life and that of my older sister were well chronicled in books of yellowed curling snapshots but this would no longer suffice. The baby’s life would be forever remembered in carousels of 35 mm slides projected grandly on a retractable screen of shimmering white sand.
My mother has just asked Mr. Blumenthal to show her how to take a picture.
“Oh it’s very simple,” he said, putting his cigarette in an ashtray. Taking the camera out of the box he turned his head to the side carefully blowing smoke away from my mother. “Argus makes a wonderful camera,” he said, peering over top his glasses and turning the Range Finder knob to 6.0. “Once you know what you’re doing, you can hardly take a bad shot.”
My mother smiled beautifully and Blumenthal snapped the first picture ever taken on our new camera. It would be a couple months before we excitedly and awkwardly put up our screen, placed the projector on a folding TV tray table and viewed our first thirty slides. Most were out of focus. Several were double exposures and one perhaps a triple. My mother’s “first” picture had a band of yellow flames transecting the top third of the photo and burning from her nose through her forehead. Otherwise it was lovely.
To be fair, photography used to be far more difficult. You had to think about what kind of film to use in what kind of light. You had to focus by hand. You had to set your shutter speed, advance your own film, hold your hands steady, breathe softly, avoid caffeine. There was a lot to think about and apparently my parents didn’t. And they had no inclination to discard that first slide. Nor did they discard any of the other nineteen hundred and seventy taken with the Argus C3 over the next two decades, thirty percent in which the subject matter was not identifiable. This is not surprising because my parents never discarded anything.
They lived in their little home for fifty years and hoped to be there longer but my mother’s increasing immobility made it impossible. Dad fought the move too long but finally resigned himself to the truth and began making plans to move into a retirement center several states away.
Looking a few weeks ahead in my calendar I realized I had some free days and called my dad to tell him I’d love to come and help him clean out his garage.
“That would be great,” he said. “How soon can you get here?”
“ I can be there the week after next,” I said.
“I’m not sure that’s soon enough,” he said. “The garage seems to have acquired the qualities of a black hole. If I open the doors other people’s junk gets sucked from their homes, up the street and into my own.”
Arriving a week later I learned that he was barely exaggerating. The piles they’d saved over the years were paralyzing. Needless to say, when I arrived, all that should have been discarded long ago was finally thrown out. There was little to keep. I found a picture of my grandpa Nelson playing steel guitar in his Swedish Gospel Quartet. It’s a professional studio shot, an eight by ten probably taken in the early ‘30s. It’s in the original mat and frame. Unbelievably, it’s still under unbroken glass. I look at it even as I write and it is a treasure. But there was little else.
Toward the end of the last day, with the garage nearly empty, my dad rummaged in the back corner, digging through one of the last of the larger boxes.
“What do you suppose we should do with these?’ he said.
I looked to see him holding a slide carousel and our old projector. I walked over and looked in the box. There were many carousels. I knew what they contained. I knew most of the slides were not very good. But I couldn’t tell him to throw them away. To be honest, I couldn’t throw them away myself.
“Put some tape on the box,” I said. “I’ll take them down to the post office and mail them to my house.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I answered. “I’ll take care of them.”
“And what about this?” he asked. In his hands he cradled the old Argus C3 Range Finder 35 mm in it’s rotting leather case.  Without a thought I carefully took the old treasure and casually tossed it against the cement block wall. We had a good laugh.

Mr. Blumenthal fit the camera into its case and screwed the fastener in the bottom connecting the two. It had begun to snow outside.
“Go slow on those roads,” he said to my mother. “It’s gonna be really slippery on the hill.”
My mother thanked him and tied a floral printed scarf beneath her chin. Mr. Blumenthal picked his cigarette out of the holder.
“I’m telling you,” he said. “You’re going to be very pleased. You can hardly take a bad picture with that camera. Those slides are going to be priceless.”
He was thirty percent right.