Through the Lens

Tugs looked down through her camera’s viewfinder and pivoted slowly all the way around and down and up. It was like watching a movie, seeing the bandstand, the bakery, the soft evening sky go by in that tiny frame. These were the same ordinary sights she’d been seeing her whole life, but suddenly they were sharp and beautiful, like little jewels collected in a box. (The Luck of the Buttons, p 102)

My first camera was a Kodak Brownie Box, the Hawkeye model. It was my summer of being twelve and Dutch Elm Disease was rampant in Minneapolis. City workers painted red lines around the trunks of doomed trees on the boulevards on my street, and though the infected trees appeared healthy, they were to be cut down within the week.

I remember standing in the middle of the street looking down through the lens of my Brownie at the long rows of elms. I noticed for the first time the perfect arch they made of the three-block length of 47^th Avenue. I couldn’t save our beloved trees, but the act of taking a picture made me feel empowered, like I was witnessing and preserving a small piece of my neighborhood’s history. 

It was a piece of Kodak camera history that led me to setting The Luck of the Buttons in the year 1929. The first Brownie came out in 1900 and was made expressly to put photography in the hands of children. In 1930, to celebrate the company's 50^th Anniversary, Kodak gave free Brownie cameras to children who turned twelve that year. 

I set my story in 1929 because I wanted Tugs to have a camera before most of her friends. I chose the Number 2 F Model for Tugs, which came in five colors. She was able to get her favorite color, green. And, lucky me, I found one just like it on ebay. 82 years old and it still works!

Meet the Buttons

A framed enlargement of this picture has hung on a wall in each of my last three houses. It is a family photograph with my grandmother's handwriting on the back: 1927 House north of town. My grandma is the one standing next to the door. Her in-laws are seated on the edge of the porch, holding my Aunt Sylvia.

Who's house is this, north of town? Why is the window broken? Why are the chickens running around? There is another picture taken just a moment before or after, without the chickens. I could find the answers to these questions easily, but because wondering about it is half the fun, I haven't asked. 

Most of all, I've wondered, why was the picture taken at all, and who is behind the camera? As a writing exercise I tried starting a story with this scene. I wrote as if this weren't my family at all, but some strangers I was encountering for the first time. After a few flat starts, Tugs Button (see yesterday's post) popped into my head as a spunky twelve-year-old girl with a new camera. This is my family, she seemed to say. Let me tell you about them. 

When something went wrong in the Button family, they shrugged, they sighed, they shook their heads. “Just our luck,” the Buttons said. 

Tell me more, I said to Tugs. And she did.