Mysteries, sadly, solved

When was the last time you turned a dial to change a television channel? Or dialed a rotary phone? In my case, I have no idea when I last performed either of those once-common tasks, even though I'm 99 percent sure I'll never do either one of them again.

As quickly as technology changes, there must be many such "lasts" occuring for each of us all the time. Very few will be missed, I guess, but I think I had one today that will be. I found an old roll of film and got it developed.

For you youngsters, "film" was what we once used to take "pictographs". It was the intermediate technology between Fred Flintstone chiseling out images on a flat rock and today's digital cameras. I haven't had a film camera in I-don't-know-how-long, and I hadn't a clue about what was on this particular roll of film.

Chances were it pre-dated the meeting of Leslie and I, I figured, because we have digital shots that go back to right about the time we met. That meant it could have been from either one of our single days, so there was, I confess, just a bit of trepidation in the air when we got the envelope home tonight to look at. (By the way, $10 now to get a roll of film developed?! Didn't it used to be like $4? I guess it has to be that way, since mine was probably the only roll of "film" they got in at the drug store all week.)

When I saw the first picture, my mind raced and Leslie started to panic. It was her, hot chick in prison...



Sadly, it was not my wife's Caged Heat audition roll. But, on the bright side, it turned out to be the roll documenting many firsts in our relationship. There was one of our first dates, when she was a grad student and I was a reporter on a Houston radio station...


And one of the first parties we attended together (a Halloween party, in case that's not obvious, and a picture apparently taken by someone with a shaky grasp of framing)...


There were also photos of the first time I met Leslie's friends. The fellow on the left in this next photo, David, who sadly passed away a few years ago, was more than anyone else responsible for us meeting, since it was he who convinced her to go trolling for desperate losers on Yahoo Personals one very late night, where of course she found me.

Here's another from that same evening which I'm including here to point out to Jay that this is Patty in SF who we were telling you about last time we saw you...

And of course, there were also pictures of the first time Leslie met my friends at dinner in Palo Alto.

How young we looked back when we were, um, young! Of course, those first meetings can be stressful, but I remember being gratified to see that Leslie fit in right away...

There were a few more along those lines, but you get the idea. Anyway, it was quite the treasure trove, even worth the $10 damn dollars for developing. But now that I have these great new old pictures, it's bittersweet. Digital cameras are great and you can't beat the price of processing, but chances are I'm never going to toss a whole digital camera in a drawer and forget about it for six years.

One more of life's mysteries... what's on this old roll of film?... eliminated. Alas.

Oh, by the way, the picture of Leslie in prison was from our first (and only) trip together to Alcaztraz. However, the way she jumped when that was on the mystery roll makes me want to go through the drawers one more time to find whichever roll she thought it was. There may be an even better mystery yet to be revealed...