More work hours spent googling, convincing myself that it was the connection; that soldering would fix it.I carefully took the camera apart tonight, trying to understand the mechanism, and also to clean any remaining corrosion from the battery area. In the process, I accidentally dropped a tiny screw into the body of the camera. Fuck. I shook the camera gently. Then a little more aggressively. Then almost threw the thing against the wall when it wouldn’t come out, but taunted me with the sound of metal scraping against the lens. Finally: success.And then I noticed something else, something I didn’t want to see–a piece of a cog.Double fuck.One of the gears is broken, which is the reason why the motor runs, but the spool doesn’t advance.Disheartened, I put everything back the way it was and set it back in its box.And then I found this, folded and pressed into one of the compartments of the original camera box:
I had never noticed it there before.
They are tickets from a tour my mom and dad took to (as the ticket stubs state) The Eagles Nest. I wonder if there is accompanying video.
And just like that, just as I felt defeated and about to give up, this discovery feels like both a punch in the sentimental gut, as well as a gentle push forward. Like Dad (or maybe the camera gods, for once) are telling me to keep going, keep searching, keep finding + uncovering bits and pieces of the past that will make it all worth while.
I’m not giving up on this camera just yet. I’m going to fix it one way or another.
