Loose ends

Ahhh, so much to share.

First, thank you all for your recent comments.
I haven't had the energy or focus to answer them in the timely manner to which I'm accustomed. I just haven't been at the computer much these past few days.

I'm not going to try to describe all of the recent events and feelings in perfect chronological order.
It has been a mishmash of emotions, and I suppose this post will reflect that ...

On Thursday, I met with one of my surgeons -- my first surgeon, actually. We were discussing palliative care as my illness enters its final stages. He joined in consensus with my other surgeons and doctors that I have just months at this point.

I have been experiencing excruciating pain recently in both legs, from just below the knees down to the ankles. The pain, tolerable during the day for the most part, hurt so much that I had been unable to sleep for several nights and was suffering for it. The surgeon on Thursday prescribed Percoset, which helps a lot but sometimes takes longer than I would like to take effect. I don't think I would be able to cope without it.

The painkiller prescription brought me face to face with an issue I had been reluctant to confront. I want to preserve my natural state of mind, such as it is, to the greatest extent possible. That is, I want to be aware of what's going on around me and inside me. I was worried that narcotic painkillers would dull this awareness, and this nearly lifelong fear was keeping me from doing the right thing. But I don't want to be in pain, and I need my sleep. So, I'm taking Percoset without hesitation.

A dear friend in Kyoto admonished me during a visit there four years ago that I should let flexibility become my most important weapon. She said it would help me confront this illness and adapt to it, rather than become mentally, spiritually and physically rigid to the breaking point. I see that she is right.

Given that toxic levels of calcium in the bloodstream can have far-reaching effects on a person's brain chemistry, I consider myself pretty blessed to have my faculties at this point. So, I think I should try to enjoy them pain-free.
As my aches and pains increase, it's amazing how quickly stoicism flees my body.
There are no brownie points in being a martyr.

I'm finding it difficult to live on my own now -- coping with the stairway to my apartment while carrying laundry or groceries, trying to keep the place clean and so on. My doctors are imploring me to be careful because a fall could be catastrophic.

Soon, I'll be moving in with my brother in New York. I'll have my own room, the tremendous help and comfort that he'll provide, a visiting hospice service, an instant circle of new friends (my brother has lots) and a simplified lifestyle.

He graciously is allowing me to bring my two cats with me. I've declined the offer and instead have found a new home for them. My brother isn't a cat person. And frankly, it's time for me to let go. If I wouldn't be seeing to the cats' future now, then it would have to be done for me soon enough and the timing won't be the same.

I'm going through my possessions now -- books, to start -- and am earmarking things for family and friends. The trash and treasures I have accumulated over a lifetime have given me much joy, and I want to share that joy now. I think it would be a great emotional burden on my family to try to distribute things the way they think I would've liked.
I am taking indescribable pleasure in this process of giving. Truly, I want for nothing.

On Wednesday, I called my karate teacher to tell him that I can no longer study my beloved martial art. I told a friend of my decision. "Sure, you need to stop if you're no longer getting anything out of it," she said. I corrected her: It's not that I'm no longer getting anything out of it. It's just that I can't bring any more into it. Classes were leaving me feeling as if I were coming apart at the seams.

I visited the dojo Saturday with bags of books for my teacher. The morning's class had just ended and most of the students had gone home.

Sensei invited me out onto the floor. "Just follow me as I do these moves," he said. "We'll do them slowly. Don't do what you can't."

He led me in very slow, measured, gentle steps through three kata. I knew these were advanced, black-belt-level kata but I can't recall seeing them performed in the dojo and I'm not even sure of their names. I am a brown belt. Were I to continue studying karate, I wouldn't have been taught these kata for several years to come.

I was overcome with emotion at the profound emotional and spiritual meaning of his gesture of symbolic instruction.
Words won't work.

Thursday, I visited my mom.
Of course it was great to see her, but I was arriving just two days after my eldest sister and her husband told her of my medical situation. I'm sure my physical appearance when I walked in the door provided all the details she needed to know.

The lighting in my apartment is very forgiving, very flattering. Facial shadows and lines are softened. Harsh angles are mitigated.
It's photographer's light.
The lighting in my mom's house is bright, all-revealing, unsparing. When I undressed to shower, I saw myself in the bathroom mirror as if for the first time. I was shocked. Frightened.
My ribs are painfully well-defined.
There's very little meat on my bones.
Muscle tone is nearly vanished.
I weighed about 155 pounds when my fight with this illness began six years ago.
I'm 116 now.

But, the day before I went to my mom's, I had a massage of my legs, neck and shoulders, which really helps with the pain, at least while the massage is being done.
I asked the masseur -- a genius of intuition and healing -- if my energy level felt as low to him as it does to me.
"No," he said. "It's actually quite strong."
He went on to relate a story about one of his clients, a woman in the final throes of lung cancer. "It made me want to cry," he said, "because when I placed my hands on her body I felt nothing. No energy. It was as if she was hollow inside."
So, I suppose I'm luckier than I think.

And finally, I have learned that my blog has been linked to the Tricycle magazine editors' blog. In the brief blurb about me, I'm described as a Zen practitioner. How ironic: A Zen practitioner without a sitting practice to speak of. I don't know whether to laugh or cry and, in fact, I did both.
I'm not sure what the hell I am anymore.
And I want to work on accepting that.

***

You know, my blog posts these days add increasing levels of doom and gloom.
It reminds me of a Daffy Duck cartoon that I particularly enjoy.
Bugs Bunny and Daffy are in the circus and are pitting their talents against each other.
Bugs, the consummate showman, repeatedly towers above Daffy's attempts to outdo him.
Daffy gets desperate.
He devises an act he's sure will outshine Bugs'.
He begins swallowing every explosive, every flammable substance he can lay his hands on.
Then he lights a match, swallows it and is blown to smithereens.
"You were excellent!" raves Bugs Bunny. "That was great! They want an encore!"
As Daffy's spirit ascends to heaven, he says ruefully, "Sorry, but I can only do that trick once."

"Let's go Outback tonight ..."

You declared open hunting season on the adults
stole the children from their parents
to "save" and civilize them
and now you use
their sacred images
and music
to sell your goddamn steaks
you piddling, unprincipled cowards
"No rules, just right"
you glibly promise;
no rules, indeed
especially where
remembering history is concerned

Untitled

I'm curled up on a bed in an ER exam room. An elderly woman lying on a gurney rolls by my door.

The gurney stops for a moment.
She turns to me and her tired, sad gray eyes meet my tired, sad blue ones.
Whisper acknowledges whisper.

Then she slowly turns away as the gurney moves on.

I've been tagged ...

I've been tagged by a man called Zen to share seven "random or weird things" about myself, and then to ask seven blog friends to do likewise. I'll leave it up to you if you want to participate.

As for me:

1) I always feel at home in houses of worship. The denomination is of no consequence.

2) I talk to myself -- and sometimes answer back. This keeps my cats amused. They thought they were the centers of attention.

3) I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a child. The family freezer was filled with clay models of dinosaurs buried in the permafrost. Luckily, the family didn't mind. I also wanted to be an astronomer but the math skills just weren't there. (I was a poor student; see No. 6.)

4) I am fascinated by insects but have a hatred of flies, mosquitoes and ticks.

5) I think one of the most beautiful tableaux in all creation is the winter nighttime sky spangled with stars. (Talk about being made to feel very small.)

6) When I returned home from living in Japan, I was jobless and nearly penniless. I took a substitute teaching position at the high school from which I had graduated about 20 years earlier. I was now a colleague of the teachers to whom I had given so much grief during my school days. I also was subjected on a daily basis to the same kinds of grief I had dished out from students who thought I was just as clueless. Thus, I learned the meaning of karma.

7) My house is very old. It was a stable a long time ago. Thus, it's drafty even at the best of times. One of my life's simple pleasures is to turn off the heat at night in winter and snuggle under the blankets. The simplest pleasures are the best ones.

Now it's your turn, if you choose ...

Moving closer

This weekend, the Zen Buddhist community to which I belong held an intensive three-day period of zazen, or sitting-zen. This event, which in Japanese is called a sesshin, was held to commemorate the day on which tradition holds that the Buddha achieved his breakthrough to complete and perfect understanding, which many call enlightenment.

I joined the group, or sangha, today, the final day of the sesshin. After a closing meal, my teacher presented me with a kit to sew a rakusu. Rakusu are the bib-like garments that symbolize in vestigial form the robes worn by Siddhartha Gautama, who would become the Buddha, as he set out on his journey of spiritual and self-discovery.

Sewing the rakusu is in preparation for the February ceremony in which I will receive the Buddhist precepts and publicly (and internally) proclaim my commitment as a lay practitioner.

My spiritual searchings have led me over varied and beautiful terrain over many years.
Have I arrived at my "spiritual destination"? I really don't know. I just don't know. I know that I'm afraid of being a spiritual dilettante, but I don't think I qualify as one. It's just time to settle down. And, now that I look back on it, I have been moving inexorably toward this decision for 15 years.

Anyway, these paths I have followed seem to me to be roads leading up the same mountain.

"I am become death, the shatterer of worlds"

Of all the articles I've read on the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, this article by journalist Larry Calloway is among the very best. The firsthand accounts by ordinary citizens who were shocked and stunned by the mysterious, otherworldly blast from the test bomb detonated in New Mexico in July 1945 make this article especially riveting.

Hiromi

East Village
Manhattan

On gossamer wings
a butterfly
arrives from across the ocean

I taught English in a junior high school during the three years I lived in rural Japan, from 1995 to 1998. During that time, Hiromi was one of my students. She was about 11 when we first met. Now she is a beautiful young woman of 23. Watching her grow up has been such a wonderful experience for me. I've also become friends with her mother and younger sister. They are like a second family to me.

Hiromi spent 10 months in Manhattan studying English at a language school. She returned home in February. On Friday, I had the good fortune to pick her up at the airport for a one-week visit.
Yesterday, we spent a great day having lunch and exploring Greenwich Village and the East Village, two of her favorite neighborhoods.

Her visit has rejuvenated me. Yesterday I was able to walk with little pain or discomfort, and her enthusiasm and fresh perspective on things were like a restorative tonic.

The timing of her visit was exquisite because I don't know if I will ever have the chance to revisit Japan, circumstances being what they are.

But seeing that her adventurous, indomitable nature and free spirit are thriving is really all I need to see.

Oracle of philaDELPHIa

Gerald "Ski" Evans
Mentor, friend, karate teacher, chess fanatic, gentleman

I spent Saturday in Philadelphia with my longtime friend and mentor, Ski.
I hoped to talk with him about my worsening medical situation. I wasn't seeking advice necessarily, but I always find that when he and I discuss something, I invariably walk away with a deeper understanding of the matter at hand.

We skirted the topic of my health. The crux of the conversation was Ski asking me if I believed in reincarnation. I have no idea what happens after death, I answered. I neither believe nor disbelieve in reincarnation. "You will," he said.

We wound up going to a big chess tournament at a Center City hotel where I met old acquaintances, made new ones and took photos of people engrossed in pitched battles fought over 64 squares.

Coming out of the tournament, Ski and I discovered that my car had been towed. I swear, that car is a magnet for the parking authorities.

I came to Philadelphia wanting to talk with Ski about mortality, perhaps seeking advice even though I wasn't aware of such an intention.
We instead went to a chess tournament and my car was towed and I spent a couple hours getting it back, paying $125 cash for the tow and owing $41 for the fine.

And perhaps therein lies the answer: Life goes on.

Anniversary

On this day in 2005, I began this blog as a chronicle of my fight against parathyroid cancer.
It quickly grew into much more than that. It became an outlet for my poetry, photography and random thoughts. And it also has served its original purpose of detailing my ups and downs, and will continue to do so.

To my regular readers, thank you sincerely for sticking with me these two years.
To my newer readers, welcome aboard. Speak up now and then.

"He's got a gun ..."

My friend and I were in an Upper East Side theater Saturday night watching "American Gangster."

This long, emotionally draining and extremely violent movie was reaching its bloody climax when a man sitting 20 feet away from us began shouting. "They [Russell Crowe's character] wouldn't be treating them [Denzel Washington's character] like that if they were white. White-ass motherf--kers."

"Shut the f--k up," yelled a theatergoer.
"Make me," challenged the angry man.

And then one by one, the people sitting near this man began getting up and leaving the theater. The man stood up, setting off an even greater rush of people, only now they were running.
"He's got a gun," one said.

My friend and I looked at each other for a split-second and then joined the rush.

On the way up the stairs a man casually asked me, "So, did he have a gun or not?"
"Why don't you go ask him," I said.

My friend and I quickly walked to a Starbucks around the corner, joined by other theatergoers who likewise ducked into the first place they saw.

We stopped by the theater about an hour later. It apparently closed for the night after the incident. I asked some exiting staff how things ended. The man was "escorted out," one of them said. "But do you have your ticket stub? You can get a rain check for the movie."

Welcome to New York.

Sage advice

I found this poem by Nanao Sakaki to be especially skillful. Sorry, the Wikipedia entry is in French.
One interesting thing about his life is that while in the Japanese army in World War II, he saw on his radar screen the B-29 that minutes later dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
That's heavy stuff.

Just Sit Here

If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot

That's progress (so get over it, Michael)

The small town in Japan in which I lived, laughed, loved, hated, cried, struggled, languished and thrived for three years no longer exists.
Physically, it's still there and is largely as I remember it, thanks to a recent bird's-eye view on Google Earth.

But its name has been stricken from Japan's roster of municipalities, a victim of a great nationwide consolidation of little villages and towns into bigger towns and cities, many complete with new names that sound sterile and squeaky clean because they're so new and pure and without baggage.

In 2006, Nosaka Town in Chiba Prefecture combined with Yokaichiba City to form Sosa City.
And in the process, local lore was lost.

Nosaka was formed in 1954 through the consolidation of two villages, Noda and Sakae. The first two kanji, or Chinese characters, of those names were blended to create Nosaka.
Yokaichiba, literally "eight day market," was named for the farmer's and tradesman's market held there on days ending in an 8. It, too, dates from 1954.

House entrance, Sawara City (now Katori City), Chiba Prefecture, Japan, 1997

Japan had tens of thousands of municipalities by the end of the Edo era in the mid-1860s, when the feudal period met its bloody demise. Those ranged from tiny villages of just a few homes to castle towns to great cities such as Edo (Tokyo), Osaka and Kyoto.
This dizzying hodgepodge has been winnowed down at intervals during the ensuing years so that now, just a few thousand distinct municipalities remain. There are fewer villages than ever.

I have no doubt that this consolidation, this simplification, this shedding of the past has cut some of the red tape that existed when there were more towns and villages, and has unquestionably saved money in the process.

But the connection to the past has suffered.
Novels, poems, biographies, period accounts, lovers' secrets make reference to place names that exist only in memory, if at all.
People have to qualify their answer when asked their hometown.

I'm sure it was like that in 1954, when Nosaka and Yokaichiba became strange new names, and in the great consolidations before that.
But a place name ties you to the land because it personalizes what you see as both yours and shared. You are a part of this place, and these are your fellow townsfolk. This is where you cast your lot. This is where new life is brought into the world, and where souls are launched into eternity.

Reality is impermanence and impermanence is reality. It's not a difficult concept to understand, at least superficially.
Feeling it in my bones, though, is another matter.

And yet ... and yet ...

As a follow-up to yesterday's post:

The flip side to whatever emotion we're feeling is just a heartbeat away.

(Thanks, Emiko-san. It is a wonderful world.)

Thoughts on a Friday night in the ER

In a burst of fury
hotter than the sun
my right fist engages
in a brief
but vicious
bout
with the bathroom door
and the door wins
like Tyson
over Spinks
only much quicker

The exquisite pain
flushes the anger
from my mind
like a burning
bubbling
stream
of peroxide
flushes out infection
and I realize
in a rush of clarity
what a long
long
journey
this
is

Jersey faces, Jersey places

Phil

Clompclompclomp

of workboots on my roof --

It's just Phil

trimming a tree

Tasha

Well dug circa 1763 in yard of carriage house where I live.
The main house, a Dutch colonial, was built in 1763 and was occupied by the British during Washington's retreat from Fort Lee. The well is no longer used, but the quality of the water is said to be nearly pristine.

Pilgrim's progress

I want to elaborate on something I wrote about in my last post.

Walking lately has become excruciating, even at a slow pace, even on level ground.
My joints have given me varying degrees of trouble over the course of my fight against parathyroid cancer. And my knees historically have been a source of bother even before that diagnosis in 2001-02. I quickly became intimately acquainted with my knees when I took up karate in 1993, and we've had a love-hate relationship ever since as karate has become an integral part of my life. (And yes, I still practice, but very carefully and gingerly, sort of how our grandfathers would.)

My neck, elbows, hips and knees have at times been painful, and often just annoying, over the last several years. But the deterioration of my knees has come about suddenly, and scarily so. The base of my neck and back of my head rank a close second, especially when I wake up in the morning. My hip pain comes and goes, like the periodic (and often unwelcome) visits of an antagonist from one's past.

This rather sudden and hopefully temporary impediment to mobility is a great blow to me, seeing as how my photography -- a passion that burns within me -- depends on getting around from place to place, in no particular order, sometimes hurriedly, sometimes leisurely.

Being hobbled also is ironic given the importance I place on physical pilgrimage, whether it's circumambulating a Japanese island as part of a 1,300-year-old Buddhist ritual or walking the length and breadth of Manhattan and down into Brooklyn (haven't been able to do that in many, many months) or just going to the toilet to take a piss.

What I'm getting at is, LIFE itself is the pilgrimage and all of the activities on that path, from the sublime to the mundane, are part of the package deal. I place lots of emphasis on the physical aspects of pilgrimage (I like to think of my photographs as postcards from the path), and walking the walk has become increasingly difficult. Maybe I need to change my focus, photographically and spiritually.

So ...

My doctors suggest a few options, beginning with X-rays to see if arthritis is the culprit (and it is a likely one, given the bone loss that's part of the range of things parathyroid cancer can do). I'll also be tested for the uric acid content in my system because my illness also can inflict gout -- not in the big toe, which it targets in otherwise healthy people, but in the joints of those with this particular cancer.

There are medications that can alleviate my symptoms once I find out just what is behind them. That's quite heartening, even though I'm not really thrilled about having even more drugs to deal with than I already do, along with their potential side effects.

Plus, I need a new bed. I've been sleeping on a futon that leaves me feeling like a science fair project gone awry when I wake up in the morning. It's destroying my lower back, which in turn could affect other parts of my body. After all, the leg bone's connected to the thigh bone ...

"Every night I still ask the Lord, 'Why?' and havent heard a decent answer yet."

--Jack Kerouac,
"Desolation Angels"

Idle camera

No photos from the weekend ... ah, well.

Saturday was a washout (we needed the rain).
Sunday, I got a late start getting into Manhattan, and once there my knees were so painful that trying to make up for lost time by covering as much ground as possible was just out of the question.
Picture Fred Sanford from "Sanford and Son" with a heavy camera bag slung across his shoulder trying to cross a busy street. Yes, my "arthuritis" got the better of me.
Hurt like hell, to tell the truth.

There was an annual Halloween dog costume contest Sunday at the dog runs at Tompkins Square Park. The crowds were large, the energy level overbearing. I gave it a miss. Besides, I covered it last year in a photo essay for a Lower East Side magazine, and once was enough.
Some people I know could use a short, sturdy leash ...

But there was one interesting encounter Sunday, which will be filed in my "It's a Small World" folder. I was walking along Seventh Street between Avenues C and D in the East Village when the facade of a pre-1900 synagogue-turned-apartment house caught my eye. There was a fellow sitting on the top step of the sandstone staircase leading up to the front door, smoking a cigarette.
"You live here?" I asked.
"Uh, yeah," he answered warily.
"I was just wondering if any of the original architectural details are preserved on the inside of the building."
He explained that a roof leak ruined the building's interior, and that when it was renovated and converted into apartments, any vestiges of its former incarnation were removed.

I don't remember how, but eventually the conversation turned to our livelihoods and I explained that I work for a daily newspaper in Jersey.
My new friend said he has a good friend who also works for a Jersey paper.
I asked the name of this fellow journalist.
Turns out that we work for the same paper and are friendly with each other.
These two guys went to college together, and the person I had just met seemingly at random was a groomsman at my colleague's wedding.

Yeah, it's a small world, all right.

Giving thanks for inspiration: Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder,
at Columbia University
Manhattan

I came face to face with Gary Snyder, one of my icons, at a poetry reading Wednesday night at Columbia University. The Pulitzer Prize winner spoke about the influence of Japanese poetics on his work and read selections from his early and more recent poetry to illustrate this influence. It was wonderful to hear his measured cadence reading poems I had read many times before but which now came to life.

Snyder was a friend of Jack Kerouac, who based the autobiographical novel "The Dharma Bums" on his relationship with Snyder, portrayed as protagonist Japhy Ryder in the book.

Reading "The Dharma Bums" and Snyder's poetry years ago stoked my growing interest in Japan and figured big in my decision to move there in the mid-1990s.

After Wednesday's reading and after I took my photographs of Snyder, I shook his hand and thanked him for his wonderful poetry. I told him how his work inspired my own journey across the Pacific, which seemed to please him. "And how'd it go?" he asked. "It changed my life," I told him. "I went there expecting to learn lots about Japan, which I did. But I wound up learning more about myself." He smiled.

There was a reception going on in the room behind where he spoke. I saw him sitting at one of the tables, patiently signing the books and photos that people were placing in front of him. Earlier, I saw a star-struck but earnest fellow give him a manila envelope with his poetry for Snyder to critique. Snyder pressed it to his forehead and thanked the man with a gassho, a Buddhist bow with palms pressed together.

I wanted to go over and chat some more with Snyder, who seemed absorbed in thought even in the midst of this throng of admirers. And then I thought, what more did I really have to say? What could I tell him that he hasn't heard 10,000 times before from fans and friends over the decades.

I had expressed my gratitude to him. What higher compliment could I pay than to acknowledge his influence on my life?

I decided to let it be.

Just to let it be.

Irony

Age and illness are the cause of such joint pain, especially in my knees and hips, that practicing karate is becoming increasingly painful and difficult, at least from the hips down.

But I can still sit easily and comfortably in the full lotus posture for extended periods of zazen.

Karate is something I actively pursue, something I regard as food for my spirit. Yet my pursuit is encountering higher and higher hurdles.

Zazen is something I used to do regularly. My practice faded long ago, but its physical underpinnings are as good as new.

I pursue the one and find my body mired in the mud, so to speak.
I've let the other fade from my life, but could return to its physical posture as easily as slipping into an old flannel shirt.

I think I'm beginning to see the light -- insofar as there is light to be seen.

Making movies

It was 1947, the year Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in a rocket plane.
My mom and dad, married three years earlier, were living in the newly constructed Stuyvesant Town housing complex on Manhattan's East Side, just blocks from where he had been born. My dad had recently finished his Stateside service in the Army during World War II in military intelligence, covert domestic operations and interrogation of German prisoners of war.
He and my mom were ready to enjoy the fruits of postwar prosperity.

My dad, circa 1942

My eldest sister was a year old, and my dad wanted to create a record of her childhood. So he bought a palm-size Filmo Sportster 8mm movie camera made by Bell & Howell.
That little Filmo went on to chronicle in shaky home movies the childhoods of my brother, born in 1950, my older sister, born in 1952, and me, born in 1962.

It also preserved my mom's parents, now both deceased, on celluloid, and also my dad's mother, whose husband had died before the Filmo could be brought to bear on him. I know my maternal grandfather, who died five years before I was born, only through the fleeting images of him captured by the Filmo and through the stories my mom and siblings tell of him.

My dad's mother died when I was 4. She was senile and playing with a Raggedy Ann doll in her nursing home bed in the only vivid memory I have of her. But in the movies created by the Filmo, she is as vibrant and full of spice as she is in the many stories I have heard about her.

Magazine ads for the Filmo Sportster, circa 1947

The last time the camera was used must have been in 1963 or '64, trying to capture me whirling like a little dervish across the basement floor of our house on Long Island, where my parents moved to enjoy the blessings of suburbia.
I still vaguely recall my dad filming me, camera in one hand and set of small movie floodlights in the other, trying to keep the lights trained on me so that I wouldn't fade into the shadows.
I could move pretty fast in those days.

My dad's Filmo Sportster

On Tuesday, I drove out to Long Island to visit my mom, who still lives in the house in which her children were raised.
I was rooting around in that same basement, trodding on the same linoleum floor over which I scooted as my dad filmed.
In a closet, I found the Filmo, still in its original box with instruction booklet, warranty card, film guide and pack of lens-cleaning tissue. It had somehow survived the rough-and-tumble years during which I used it as a toy, pretending to make movies like my dad.
Its leather case was still supple, its gray pebble-finish metal body still unscratched and nearly brand-new.
And it still worked, its motor emitting a soft whir as the shutter button was pushed.

So many gossamer memories almost transparent with age are trapped inside that old camera.