The Sunlit Alley

     Some extra cash and an interest in photography led me to a downtown camera shop where I purchased a Nikon 35 MM item with a couple of extra lenses, a flash attachment, and a lot of film. I took to spending my lunch hours shooting photographs of architecture, antique and unusual vehicles that passed before my lens, textures and colors, and even piles of trash in a sun-lit alley.

     “What’s so special about that?” my then-wife asked about the image of the sun-bathed alley. “What makes it camera-worthy?”

     I explained that, coming from an industrial city east of the Mississippi River, alleys were dark, dingy, and sinister places steeped in gloom and shadow. An alley such as this, illuminated by a clear, bright natural light that outdoor photographers prayed for, would be an alien sight to the eastern native.

     The Nikon went everywhere with me. I took care to never leave it in the car while I shopped, dined, or handled business in the glass-and-steel towers downtown. I parked it under my desk at the office. 

     The camera and the images it captured had my attention so focused that I was unaware that I was being followed.

     I awoke one morning to the smell of rain and a battleship-gray sheet that stretched across the sky—the kind of light that would render photographs flat and lifeless. “No use carrying a camera bag around today,” I thought. I left it at home and went to work with an umbrella replacing the Nikon.

     My house was broken into that day. The thief took the camera and its accoutrements.
     I convinced myself that the crime was committed by the eldest son of a neighborhood family of slack-jawed white trash known as the source of neighborhood burglaries and petty thefts. Armed with a baseball bat, I paid a visit. My rage was only heightened when no one answered the door. I slammed the Louisville Slugger through a porch window and the cheap, hollow-core door and returned home, rage spent.
     Later, the weight of what I had done fell on me. I had no evidence that the young man whose home I lashed out at had actually stolen my passion. I promised myself that I would never again allow anger to do my thinking for me.
     The theft and the awareness that my actions were as immoral as the thief's broke my spirit. I lost all desire to ever shoot another photograph. The Nikon was the last camera I would own until the development and marketing of smartphones. The only thing I use that camera for is to photograph documents for transmittal. Not even the thought of a sun-drenched alley stirs my interest.