Found Objects

An unexposed roll of film sat on my souvenir shelf. I'd forgotten where it had come from when I'd unpacked it.

Maybe it wasn't even mine. Maybe it was Yancey's. Maybe it had been at the bottom of a drawer. Or maybe there was nothing on it at all.

All unknown rolls of film must be developed, so today I trotted down the four flights of stairs out of the apartment, and two blocks down the street to the photo counter at the drugstore in the mall. The Newport Mall sits between me and the Hudson River, between me and the PATH train. A passageway through the mall stays open at night so that residents of Hamilton Park don't have to walk around the long way.

The result? The photos didn't look like any I remembered shooting, but they could be mine. They were from between 1996 and 2000. And they were far more likely to be Yancey's than mine. But they were mine now. No way would I give these photos up. Pond Scum, Yancey, Dave Sharpe, and Babc0ck. And I was even in one of them. They were from the old Marvel offices and from Babcock's condo when he was renovating.

On the walk home, I remembered where the roll of film came from. It had been in my ancient Canon AE-1, a camera I still have and don't know what to do with. A camera that Babc0ck had borrowed sometime in the last decade or so, and kept for many years.

He'd told me it didn't work. He was wrong.