Weeks and Days

by S.E. Phinney

“Why a cartwheel in the rain?” I asked him. He was quiet for a moment. Then, “Because I could,” he said. “Think about it. You’re sixteen, am I right? You’re young, and healthy, and there are a lot of things you can do now that, physically, you won’t be able to do fifty years from now, or thirty, or ten, or perhaps even fewer. Perhaps there’re even things you were once able to do but even now find you can’t. “Sometimes,” he said, “on family visits, I’ll sit and watch my little cousins play. They can run and run and run and never get tired. I firmly believe you could enter any average, untrained six-year-old in a marathon, and he’d finish near the top of the pack. And we all used to be able to do that, you know. Or at least the vast majority. But

“Oh,” I said. “Well, but, I don’t actually want to take pictures. Just develop the film. And make the prints, I guess. But not the camera part. If I just wanted to take pictures, I could use my phone.” I paused. “I think what I want is the physical, tactile part. Taking a reel full of transparent tape and exposing it to certain liquids for a certain time and turning it into tiny little images, and then projecting those images onto a blank piece of paper with a certain kind of light, and certain other chemicals, and when you’re all done, it’s worked, and you’ve made something out of nothing.”