Chapter 14: Night Thoughts

3:30 am.

Crap.

I can't sleep. My spouse can. I debated waking her up to share my pain. Decided against that. She gets cranky when I wake her up before she's ready. Beating off is always a possibility. The minutes dragged on. I know they dragged because I was staring at the clock, waiting and watching for the numbers to change. It took forever.

The dark was like a cloud, no, a shroud, about us. We both liked our bedroom as dark as possible to sleep. The honeycomb shades did the trick. In fact, it was practically dark enough to load film canisters, if I was still developing my own film. I'd stopped that a couple of years ago when I finally ran out of steam. Six rolls from a long weekend at Yosemite, and in my rush to develop them and see what I had I told myself that the developer I had from a couple of months ago would be good enough. It wasn't.

I remember that afternoon. My stomach knotted as though I was going to throw up. I felt a lead weight on my heart. Mostly, I felt despair. Fucked up again. The evidence was quite clear. "Clear," in fact, described the result perfectly. Virtually no detail at all in the negatives. Nothing. Zilch. Nothing I could salvage, even with the hardest highest-contrast paper I could find. It was hopeless. I felt like shit. Like failure. Dad wouldn't have approved, I'm sure of that.

Just a fuckup. That's what it felt like and that's what it was. So, no, I didn't cry, but I felt like it. I solved it the way I'd solved so many similar things over the years: I cut it out of my life. I told myself it was because I was bored with it, that I hated darkroom work, that I was only doing it because Dad did it and my brother the jerk did it, and I didn't really want to do it, anyway.

That wasn't entirely true, though. The fact is that while I was no Ansel Adams, I got some pretty good results. Mostly in portraits, now and then in a landscape. Lee was my primary subject in the early years, no surprise there, and our kids when they came along, alone and in groups, sometimes with grandparents or aunt, absorbed in whatever they were doing. Reading, sometimes, kid in lap. A favorite was one of Julie and her grandfather, watching her grandfather put together a scooter for her. Julie's eyes watching, her face attentive, anticipation in her eyes, her grandfather turning a screw, focusing, intent on what he was doing.

I know it's a mixed picture. Hell, my whole life is a mixed picture, for that matter. I always stopped short of getting to the real issue, the one underneath. Was I really bored with darkroom work? Well, yes. I wanted it to be done, I took shortcuts, I didn't do that one more print that would have been better. I settled for "good enough," and only once in a while did I actually produce something really good. When I did, it was grand, no question, but too often it was a print that was "almost." "Almost," the story of my life.

There was something else going on, too, and that was what to do with all these pictures. We couldn't afford to mount and frame all of them, and we never really settled on a decent display, so I kept filling photo paper boxes with prints, one after another, until I had a stack two feet tall. Once in a while I sorted through them, remembering the moment, enjoying them.

Remembering the moment. That was it, really. Many of the images did bring back the moment to me. Mostly they were good moments, not always. Was I ever "there" there? I don't know. Maybe I've been a watcher all my life, and not just watching physically. I'm an observer. "In the moment," is easy to say, hard for me at least to realize. I'm always waiting for the next moment, always worrying about something, anything, never quite there. Well, there's one outstanding exception to that, though. When I've just come inside Lee and I'm lying on top of her, sated, my cock as far up inside her as I can get, her arms tight around my back, our lips locked or our cheeks solidly against each other.