My sister found and sent me a picture of a single-serving carton of the chocolate milk we both grew up on and it looked exactly the same. This set me off into a slow moving spiral of sappy nostalgia, like a wheel within a wheel, you might say, a mood that I was already in this morning, having just finished a roll of film that was in my dad’s Kodak Advantix camera—a roll he’d loaded some decades ago but never used. So now I’m sharing these random moments I’ve collected around town; quiet moments in the noise.
I found my dad’s Kodak Advantix Preview while going through his stuff back in Lebanon. I remember him having this now-obsolete film format back in Kuwait, but I don’t remember this particular camera—a real oddity, featuring a temporary digital preview of the last shot you took that can’t be saved or transferred and doesn’t affect the exposure itself at all; not really a preview, since you can’t retake the shot, but a promise of what’s to come once you get your prints back, I guess. It feels like those weird transitionary species like the duck-billed platypus that are stuck somewhere in the middle of an evolutionary leap. I wonder why he got it; it looks basically unused.
I finished the roll today and haven’t sent it to the lab yet; I haven’t used APS film for a while, because very few developers still work with it. Every roll you find is expired because no one makes them anymore, and I doubt that anything will come out of this one. But I wanted to finish the roll for dad, showing him the mundane moments of my life here—something he never got to see.
One of my last messages to him before he passed was about that; about how I wished he’d had the chance to visit. This is my way of bridging that gap.
Like art therapy, Christine tells me.
“Round like a circle in a spiral,
like a wheel within a wheel,
Never ending or beginning
on an ever spinning reel—
Like a snowball down a mountain,
or a carnival balloon—
Like a carousel that’s turning,
running rings around the moon—
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
past the minutes of its face,
And the world is like an apple
whirling silently in space—
Like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind.”