The older son was good natured from the start. It’s as if he awoke every morning and said to himself, “I think I’m going to have a happy day,” and then set about making it so. He filled his days with big smiles for everyone who caught his gaze. He encountering everything – toy, television show, meal, our dog, other children – with such joy and delight you’d think it was long lost and beloved.

The colic that plagued him the first nine months of his life stood out in stark relief. Things started going south for him each day by late afternoon. By the time I came home from work he was fully miserable and wailing like an air raid siren. His frazzled mother immediately handed him off to me and and disappeared into the kitchen to seek relief (and make dinner). Now, I cared about my poor son’s suffering. But honestly, I mostly just wanted his eardrum-piercing shrieks to end. Seriously, you could hear the boy out in the yard even when all the windows and doors were closed. I quickly figured out that holding him to my chest as I paced through the house calmed him some. I tried singing to him as I paced and found that some songs calmed him a little while others had no effect. I tried every song in my repertoire. When I sang this obscure Paul McCartney and Wings song to him, he went limp and silent in my arms. So I sang it to him over and over, pacing the length of our ranch-style home every night for hours at a time. Finally, blessedly, the colic ended.

My younger son, on the other hand, approached life with steely determination. Think Chuck Norris out to get the bad guys. The boy quickly sized up a situation, identified his goal, and set about achieving it. His first conquest was the couch. It was cute at first to watch him grunt and struggle to pull himself up off the floor and onto the seat cushions. But after he achieved that, he set his sights on the arm and then the side-table lamp, which was not going to end well. We had to keep an eagle eye on that kid!

But with each new objective his desires at first outpaced his abilities. He would try and fail, and try and fail, and try and fail, getting angrier and angrier all the way. Soon his frustration would consume him and he’d just cry in hard fury, turning brick red and gasping through his sobs. I’d collect him into my arms, fall back into the big comfy recliner, and rock while I sang to him just hoping he’d catch a breath! At first this would make him cry harder, as if he was determined to stay angry. But soon he’d start to relax, and the crying would ebb, and finally he’d breathe easy. This gentle Paul Simon song was easy to sing quietly to him and soon I sang it habitually. After a while, just hearing me sing it calmed him.

I’m reflecting on this today because tomorrow my older son, still the good-natured optimist, turns 15.

Do you have children? What songs did you sing to them?

I’ve always loved to sing. It soothes me and lifts my spirits. Read that story.

These bridges were built in S shapes because it allowed the bridges to cross their respective creeks at right angles, which made them less expensive to build and maintain. In those days, traffic moved along the road at essentially a walk. But traffic speed increased considerably in the automobile age, and cars had to slow way down to negotiate these bridges. They were both bypassed by the early 1930s in the interest of speed and safety.

The first of these bridges stands almost exactly between Cambridge and New Concord and is known as the Cassell S Bridge. You can see its lithe S shape on the left in the aerial image below. I would not be surprised to find that Township Highway 4174, in the upper right, is part of the road’s original alignment leading up to the bridge.

Imagery © 2011 Digital Globe, GeoEye, USDA Farm Service. Map data © 2011 Google.

Here’s the bridge on the ground. It is original to the road, built in about 1828 when the National Road was extended through Ohio. It was restored in 2006.

The brick deck was probably originally laid in the 1910s.

Someone needs to come out here with some Roundup and a weed whacker.

The Fox Creek S Bridge, which stands on the west end of New Concord, was also built in about 1828. It’s easy to miss. I was looking for it, and I only caught it out of the corner of my eye as I sped past. I had to turn around and come back to it.

Imagery © 2011 Digital Globe, GeoEye, USDA Farm Service. Map data © 2011 Google.

Isn’t it a beauty? I think I like this one a little bit more than the Cassell bridge.

This photo from the Historic American Engineering Record shows the bridge in the early 1930s. Notice how US 40 already bypasses it on the left.

Here’s the deck. A short segment of the brick road extends west beyond the bridge, and you can drive on it to access a small parking area.

This bridge’s restoration added a narrow path that lets you get close and even walk under the bridge.

It’s not very often you can get personal with the underside of an old bridge!

This milestone, probably a reproduction, stands nearby.

I encountered two other S bridges on my Ohio National Road trip – a fabulous three-span S bridge at Blaine, and a crumbling S bridge near Old Washington that still carries traffic.

I’ve driven the National Road from end to end, across six states, and have documented it extensively. Read everything I’ve written about it.

I’ve adored the original Volkswagen Beetle ever since I saw the movie Herbie the Love Bug as a small boy. I’ve always wanted one! They were common as pennies until about 20 years ago, which was about the time I came close to buying a Karmann Ghia – a Beetle with an Italian body. I couldn’t scrape together the cash at the time. I wouldn’t have that trouble today, but the supply of these cars has all but dried up.

I had loaded my Minolta Hi-Matic 7 with some Fujicolor 200 last autumn and was out wandering the parking lot at work looking for things to shoot when I came upon this Beetle. I liked how the shadow curved with the fender. The tail light’s size and shape dates this car to 1968-1972.

I photographed another green Beetle earlier in the year. Check it out, along with all the other old cars I shot in 2011.

This is how it looked in 2007 when my friend Brian and I explored US 31′s old alignments in northern Indiana. (That’s Brian walking away on the old road bed.) I wrote about the trip; read about it here. Some time later I received an e-mail from a woman who read my report. Jean owns the property around this abutment and was worried that the abutment’s stones were loose and falling out. She wondered if I knew of anyone who would take up the preservation mantle for this landmark. I didn’t. But that didn’t stop Jean. She found an Eagle Scout candidate looking for a service project and convinced him to take it on. He mortared the stones to secure them, and laid some pavers down where the old road bed had crumbled away.

The Eagle Scout finished his work in late 2010, but it took me until late 2011 to drive by here with my camera in hand. I’m glad to see this old abutment preserved for another generation.

175 miles south of here on the Michigan Road, a stone bridge built in the early 1900s still carries traffic. Check it out!

The summer I turned 9, my brother and I took our first annual summer trip to visit our grandparents at the little Michigan lake to which they had retired. We spent a couple weeks with them, fishing and relaxing and watching late-night TV. We spent one hot afternoon visiting garage sales and at one I found a little Kodak Brownie Starmite II, a plastic fixed-focus camera from the early 1960s. I turned it over and over, very curious. Grandma saw me looking at it, noticed the 25-cent price tag, and silently handed me a quarter. And so I got my first camera.

I played with the camera quite a bit the rest of the time I was at Grandma’s. I figured how to wind and shoot it. I removed the film transport,  pressed my eye to the camera’s open bottom, and pressed the shutter to see light flash into the camera for a fraction of a second. I was fascinated by how the camera functioned and by all the thought and work that had gone into designing and building it.

When I returned home I loaded the camera with film. The neighborhood kids made me the center of attention – they all wanted to be in a picture. I shot the roll in an afternoon. When I brought the developed photos home from the drug store I was the center of attention again, as everyone wanted to see themselves. I must have given most of the photos away, because I have only four left. Here’s a picture from that first roll of film, from August, 1976.

An early-1950s Brownie Reflex found its way into my hands and I enjoyed it, too. So I started buying other old cameras at garage sales, spending many happy hours learning their intricacies. Old cameras were often available for pocket change and few that I found cost more than $5, which made this hobby affordable. By the time I was a young adult I had more than 100 cameras. The majority of them were common snapshot cameras; probably a third of them were broken. My collection did contain some gems – a Stereo Realist that took 3D photos, a Minolta 16-II subminiature camera, an Polaroid Model 95 that had belonged to my dad’s father, a Polaroid Super Shooter my grandparents gave me one Christmas (read that story), and a Kodak Automatic 35F that took some great photos on a trip to the Tennessee hills.

I displayed my favorite cameras in my home as an adult. My young sons were curious about my cameras, and we spent many pleasant hours on the living room floor playing with them. When I loaded film into one, they clamored to be in the photos just like the children in my old neighborhood. Then my marriage fell apart. In the process I sold or gave away a great number of things, and other things were simply lost. My entire first collection is gone.

Five years ago I started buying old cameras again and was delighted to find that even after 30 years I had not lost my fascination with things that require careful design and construction. Prices are naturally higher, but this hobby remains affordable with many interesting cameras available for as little as $10. I typically pay $20 to $40 for my cameras with a soft upper limit of $50, which I have broken on rare occasion. And so once again the fireplace mantle and many spare shelves in my home are lined with cameras. But this time, instead of collecting whatever cameras I find, I generally limit myself to working cameras that use film that can still be purchased. I shoot with as many of them as I can, writing about the experience and sharing some of the results here. I am enjoying this hobby even more this second time around.

Some photos from cameras in my first collection can be found in this post and in this post.

The No. 3A Autographic Kodak is a giant among folding cameras at 4¾ inches wide by 9½ inches tall – 1¾ inches wider and 3¾ inches taller than my more typically sized folding Kodak Six-20. That’s because the No. 3A takes size 122 film, which produces big postcard-sized 3¼-by-5½-inch prints. Postcard collectors know well the “real photo postcards” produced when photographs were printed onto paper marked with a place for a stamp, address, and message. Kodak introduced size 122 film in 1903 just for this purpose. Real photo postcards were popular for several decades, finally falling out of favor by the 1960s. Kodak soldiered on with the format but finally gave up, producing its last roll of 122 in 1971.

The real photo postcard was at its peak in 1914, however, when Kodak introduced the No. 3A for a 20-year manufacturing run. As an autographic Kodak, it included a flip-up door on the back and a little stylus. When special autographic film was loaded into the camera, lifting the door let you write a few words on the film’s backing paper. Then you’d leave the door open for a few seconds in the light, which caused the words you wrote to transfer photographically to the negative. Kodak suggested that this be used to record the photograph’s subject, the date, and even the camera’s settings as a reminder when the photographs were returned from being developed and printed. Typical of autographic Kodaks, my No. 3A’s stylus was lost long ago.

Kodak offered its No. 3A with a few different combinations of lens and shutter. This one comes with the premium f/7.7 Anastigmat lens, which could be stopped down to an itty-bitty f/45. Its Kodak Automatic shutter can expose the film at 1/100, 1/25, 1/5, 1/2, and 1 second, as well as time and bulb.

Focusing the lens involves moving the entire lens assembly along its rails. You first lift, slide, and set the black “catch” on the focus scale to the desired distance. Then you squeeze the two chromed levers toward each other and slide the lens assembly up to the “catch,” where it stops.

To frame a photograph, you lift up the chromed cover on the viewfinder and peer down through it, aligning the camera until you’re satisfied. The No. 3A’s lens assembly can move horizontally and vertically to fine-tune the framing. Making it move is a little complicated, so I’ll skip telling you how.

Given the No. 3A’s defunct film format, I’m unable to try out this camera. It’s just as well, as the bellows is full of holes! So I bought another Kodak Metal Tripod No. 1, screwed this camera onto it, and placed it on display in a corner of my home office. I’ll get to enjoy it every day this way!

Do you like old cameras? Then check out my entire collection.

Enjoying one of my hobbies

Yet I still find myself looking for things that are wrong and focusing on them. I spent so much time in crisis in about 2000-2006 that it became my default mode, and it’s been hard to shake it. So I’ve decided to focus on enjoying what I have in 2012, discarding useless worries about what isn’t right or perfect in my life. When 80% of my life is fine, why focus inordinately on the 20% that isn’t?

I like what Amy Parmenter wrote recently on her blog about choosing three words that represent the growth she’d like to achieve this year. (Read her three words here.) So I added two other words that I think will help me have a happier 2012.

• Enjoy. For the reasons cited above.
• Calm. Because I’m an anxious sort.
• Health. Because I’m getting older and it takes intentional effort to feel as good as I used to.

What three words might you choose as your focus for 2012?

When I was 16, I spent a summer on an exchange program in Krefeld, Germany with 30 other teenaged Hoosiers. On the flight over, engine trouble forced us to land in Düsseldorf rather than in Frankfurt as planned. Because Düsseldorf expected no international flights that day, nobody was working in customs. My passport went unstamped, and I waltzed into Germany uncounted. How very un-German.

Several weeks later, my group visited Berlin. The Wall would not fall for five more years. At Checkpoint Alpha on the East German border, grave, armed border police in fitted olive uniforms boarded our bus and, without looking at or speaking to anyone, collected all of our passports and exited. They made us wait more than an hour, our anxiety growing, before they returned with our passports (all tossed into a box) and waved us through. Each passport had received an East German stamp. The road from there to Berlin was bounded by walls so tall that we couldn’t see over them even from our bus seats way up high. I guess the communists didn’t want you to see the glorious living conditions on the inside, or everybody would want to move there. Several hours later down that road we were easily waved through the checkpoint at the West Berlin border.

A few days later we crossed into East Berlin to see the sights. At the famous Checkpoint Charlie, stone-faced border police once again boarded our bus, collected our passports, and made us wait for a long time before they returned them all stamped.

In East Berlin I walked in the Alexanderplatz, stood in line to buy a communist propaganda rag, er, newspaper (the top story that day was essentially how President Reagan was an idiot), drank beer and laughed with teenaged East Berliners, and tried to use a fetid underground open-pit public restroom. Shudder. I held it until we got back to the west.

In West Berlin, I bought a book called Durchschaut die Uniform, or See Through the Uniform, telling stories of border guards — not only about the distasteful jobs they did, but about the people they were. The last page showed two pictures of four border guards, the first with their stony faces and the second with wide smiles. The second photo seemed so strange! But I got the book’s point, which was to have a heart because these guards were real people. So I decided to put on a pleasant face for them on the way home. As we left, we passed back through Checkpoint Alpha. Dour border police boarded our bus and collected passports. When they took mine, I looked them in the eye and smiled. It was met with indifference. They just took our passports and inspected our bus for things we were not allowed to take out. Inspection successful, they left and we were free to pass through. We made our way back across free Germany to Krefeld.

A few years later I renewed my passport when it expired. I wondered if anybody at the passport agency noticed that my old passport contained stamps only from communist East Germany.

Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and the United States rode in on its white horse ostensibly to save the day. It was war, and I was draftable, so I was nervous about what might come.

At work the next day my co-workers were subdued and serious. I worked as best I could while I listened to news reports on the radio. Midafternoon, the receptionist called from the main building. “Uh, Jim?” she said. I could hear concern in her voice. She paused. “Uh… Jim, there’s a man from the FBI here to see you.”

My mind reeled for several seconds. My passport! They must have a file with my name on it! They think I’m red! They’ve come to carry away the commies!

“Jim?”

“Um. Yes. Tell him to drive across the street to this building.”

I stepped outside to await my doom. I paced under the gray sky, wondering what the internment camp would be like. Before long, a gray Chevrolet sedan turned in and parked. Out stepped a doughy man in a gray suit. He approached, showed me his ID, identified himself, and asked, “Are you James Grey?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Is there a place where we can talk privately?”

I thought, “Talk privately? Aren’t you here to purge the land of communists in the name of national security?” I was growing dizzy, but I said, “Sure, come inside.” I led him to an empty room and we sat down.

“Mr. Grey, do you know a man named Robert Woolf?”

I’ve heard stories about what happens to cars that are accidentally shifted into reverse while going 40 miles per hour. Namely, the car’s transmission suddenly disintegrates, distributing its pieces along the road. This is what happened to my brain at that moment.

In shock, I managed to say, “Yes, I know Bobby.” Where the heck was this going?

“I need to ask you some questions about Mr. Woolf.”

Bobby, a college friend and roommate, was a sharp, smart guy who majored in computer science and is now well-respected in his field. His senior year, as he looked for his first job, he applied at the National Security Agency. He was pretty jazzed about the job, but he never heard back from them. He applied for other jobs and eventually accepted one in Silicon Valley. He used to e-mail me complaints about the traffic out there.

“Is this about the NSA job? Don’t you know that Bobby accepted another position?”

The agent paused. He may have swallowed. He said, deliberately, “Yes, every person I talk to tells me that. But I have to do these interviews anyway.”

So for twenty dull minutes he asked me questions about Bobby’s associations and character. I told him what I knew and he went on his way. I felt sorry for the guy having to drive all over the place talking with Bobby’s friends and family, needlessly looking for skeletons since Bobby no longer wanted that job. I tried to empathize with the guy, but he’d have none of it. He stuck to his questions until he had no more to ask, and then he got back into his gray sedan and drove away.

I learned that it’s fruitless to try to connect with a government official doing a distasteful or useless job. They just want to get it over with.

But at least there was no internment camp for me!

I was extremely fortunate that WordPress.com featured two of my posts on its daily Freshly Pressed feature early in the year, bringing a surge of visits and netting a few new regular readers. But then I spent the whole summer detailing my trip across Ohio’s National Road. I found the whole thing endlessly fascinating, but given that readership slowly declined post after post, I’d have to say that most of you were not as enthralled. Lesson learned! Here are the five posts from 2011 that got the most visits.

• Living vicariously through wealthy car collectors – Photos from my annual visit to the Mecum muscle car auction, it was featured on Freshly Pressed.
• Zeiss Ikon Contessa LK – This 1960s 35 mm camera has a wonderful lens and gave me some excellent results.
• Vintage TV: 1970s weather forecasts – I can’t believe that this post full of YouTube clips of 1970s TV weathercasts hit the big time.
• Kodak Brownie Starmatic – My other Freshly Pressed entry this year, it is about a 1950s Kodak camera that sets exposure for you.
• Kodak Signet 40 – I was surprised both that this 1950s Kodak gave such pleasing results and that so many people were interested in this almost-forgotten camera.

I think a better measure of a post’s impact is how many comments it gathers. These are the most commented posts of the year.

• Kodak Brownie Starmatic – One happy effect of being Freshly Pressed is that lots of people comment.
• Living vicariously through wealthy car collectors – Ditto.
• Captured: Letting my sleeping dog lie – This simple photo of my snoozing pooch moved several readers.
• The Indiana Fried Chicken Tour: Kopper Kettle – Fried chicken has wide appeal!
• Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, Flash Model – This camera had an exposed roll of film inside it. I had it developed and got back ten images from a late-1960s family vacation. Lots of people agreed with me that this was cool!

As usual, the posts I liked the best didn’t climb to any heights. Don’t click any of the links above; those posts have gotten plenty of love. Please, go read these.

• Eventually you realize you’re the common denominator in your problems – Teetering once again at the edge of burnout, I finally faced how I let this keep happening to me.
• Why New Jersey’s anti-bullying law is both too much and not enough – It was hard to share publicly how badly I had been bullied as a teenager, but doing so established my credibility when I blasted New Jersey’s anti-bullying law.
• Moving on is a simple thing; what it leaves behind is hard – Why I left my church when it was struggling to stay alive.
• Paul McCartney kind of saved my life once; he has no idea of course – I was down, really down. Some Paul McCartney music was the knot at the end of my rope.
• I came to believe – How a leap of faith followed by patient determination cemented my faith in God.

Thank you for reading Down the Road. Your visits and especially your comments are what encourage me to keep writing.

Most popular posts ever: about bad grammar, a broken cup, a folding Kodak, a rangefinder Minolta, and The CBS Late Movie.

Maxwell Obadiah

When I got married, two cats were part of the bargain. Simone, a blue-point Siamese, was my wife’s, and Sally, a brown tabby, was my stepson’s. Naturally, at least to my wife’s logic, I needed my own cat. Knowing I was a dog person, she decided that another Siamese was the right choice for their high sociability and how tightly they bond with people. “A Siamese is about as close to a dog as a cat gets,” she said. And so we got Max, a chocolate-point Siamese kitten.

Young Max was a pain in the neck. He slept all day, but then ran around the house all night while we tried to sleep. He made a loop from our bedroom, down the hall, through the living room, into the family room, and then back. Tromp, tromp, tromp, tromp, tromp, tromp – quieter, quieter, very quiet, louder, louder, louder, and then the whole bed shook when he landed on it. He spent many nights shut in the laundry room with his litter box so we could sleep.

He was also on a mission to annoy the tar out of poor Simone and Sally. He’d walk up to Sally and just bat her in the face. Sally, who brooked no nonsense, always clobbered Max right back. Simone, on the other hand, was a gentle old lady, and she really took a lot of abuse from Max. But there was one situation where Simone always drew the line. She liked to sleep on my butt. I’m a stomach sleeper, you see. Max, covetous of this prized perch, would try to bodily shove her off, and Simone would hiss and growl and bat at him with her clawless paws. What a way to be awakened in the middle of the night! That, too, would earn Max a night in the laundry room.

Kittenhood’s exuberance eventually waned, and Max grew fat. He also developed a perpetual sinus condition. It was worst in the wintertime, and he’d spend hours hanging off a table in the family room, enjoying the heat radiating from the baseboard heater below. His meow always came out as mehfffff, the last of it through his stuffy nose.

Adult Max was quite dear. He’d come running to greet me when I came home from work at night. He loved to crawl up into my lap when I worked at my computer, and when I sat in the La-Z-Boy to watch TV he’d recline right next to me with his belly exposed and his hind legs splayed. He looked ridiculous when he did that! But he would sit there with me for hours, purring.

And then the company I worked for couldn’t afford to pay me anymore. I spent four months looking for work. They say job hunting should be a full-time job, but despite diligently working my network and applying for every job in my field for which I was even remotely qualified, I still had a lot of time on my hands. So I was home a lot. Max was thrilled to have me there, always underfoot, mehffing and purring and rubbing against me seeking my attention. I spent my free time reading Carl Sandburg’s biographies of Abraham Lincoln, and Max spent every moment of it either in my lap or reclined next to me. He really lifted my spirits at a time when I felt pretty down.

When my wife and I separated, I had to leave Max behind. He died before I could take him back. I still miss my little buddy.

And then I got the dogs in the divorce. Sugar passed away in 2008; I still have Gracie.