Our theme for the month of March is “light.”
My new car (new to me) has a light my old car didn’t have. It’s a golden-orange wrench.
When the light first came on, my insides shrank up like the cheap, cream blinds in my apartment when the cord is yanked. I’ve only been driving Hailey the Honda a few months.
Hailey’s predecessor, Ferdinand, is a sandy 1999 Ford Taurus without a single bell or whistle. Ferdinand was my first car, named for a character in the beloved picture book Ferdinand the Bull. In the six years I drove dear Ferdie, I became well acquainted with Ferdinand’s check engine light.
Ferdinand had a flair for the dramatic and used to “die” a few times a year for the attention, despite regular oil changes and maintenance. He also had an impressive vocabulary of strange noises—clunks, thunks, wheezes, and grinds.
It always seemed as if the check engine light would come on right in the middle of some other crisis—in a period of unemployment, right after a move, or during a global pandemic. That grim harbinger of frustration and expensive repairs would blink on when I was already stretched thin, on the brink of breakdown in more ways than one. Cruel poetry.
But the little wrench light on my dash is not, it turns out, the check engine light. It’s a maintenance light, reminding me to change my oil. What a privilege to have moved into a new stage of life where there are reminders before breakdowns, yellow lights before red. Margins.
Around the same time I bought Hailey, I also bought a used camera from a friend. It takes pictures on film.
It’s a Konica Autoflex TC. It has two great technological features: an unreliable timer and a battery-operated light meter.
The light meter is a red, thermometer-like bar on the right side of the viewfinder that coaches me through setting the exposure on the lens for each shot. I think. I’m pretty sure I’m doing it right three shots out of four. We’ll find out when I develop the film.
The way I see it, light’s relationship with film is a lot like the relationship between dangerous, brooding boys and doe-eyed heroines in YA romance novels. The light poses a clear threat to the film, but it’s also the companion to film that can bring out interesting aspects of the material. Maybe that metaphor gives brooding boys too much credit. Probably. But the key to a good relationship between light and film is boundaries. The light meter checks the temperature of your surroundings and helps you set those boundaries.
The process of cocking the lever that pulls a shot’s worth of film into place, reading the light meter, twisting the lens to set the exposure, framing the image, and firing the shutter—the camera’s blinking eyelid—takes several intentional seconds. I discovered recently that those seconds, however brief, are more than the length of time a bighorn sheep is willing to hold a pose. And every shot creates something real and material, takes up real, material resources. It’s sensitive to circumstances, to life, to physicality.
On the bottom of the camera, right under “made in Japan,” one of its previous owners engraved in ragged, almost illegible script, “Willa (or Will A) R oos (or 008) ME.” And below that off slightly to the side, “868.”
It’s one of my favorite aspects of the camera. I have no idea what the numbers mean. My theory: it’s an incomplete attempt to mark an address so the camera can be returned if it’s left behind.
Like the fragile film inside, the camera is sensitive to the world around it. It bears the marks of use. It’s shaped by human touch, by exposure. Because the device is mechanical, directly affected by physical processes, I can understand it better than I understand data on chips or stored in clouds.
This is Hailey the Honda’s one shortcoming. Hailey does have bells and whistles and many many lights—a glowing ring around the speedometer that tells me how fuel efficient my driving is, lights to show when the passenger side airbag and seatbelt are engaged, a whole touchscreen. Hailey’s problems, when they happen, are likely to extend beyond the mechanical parts that turn gasoline into propulsion. I got a new car, but I don’t really get my new car.
There’s a lot of things—things that make my life easier, things I am privileged to have—that I don’t “get.” I couldn’t fix them or even diagnose the problem.
The vast majority of the processes that make my life possible happen behind a sort of curtain. I type keys and press buttons, and somewhere within metal carcasses and the amorphous infinity of the internet, something happens. Or so they tell me.
Of course I am grateful for the margins, for boundaries, for readings and temperatures that diagnose and give warning of what’s going on in the processes that compose my life.
But I can’t help but feel some connection has been lost. Complexity in our lives solves some problems and creates others. My life, and its pace, is mysteriously dependent on a host of complex devices. My little Luddite rebellion is to buy film cameras and vinyl records in crumbling cardboard sleeves and to bake bread every so often. These things are a kind of maintenance on the intricate machine that is my life, a quick peek under the hood to remind myself how things work on a basic level.
Beauty is a moment engraved on our mind by light’s laser piercing through the lens of our pupils. At any time we can change the shutter speed and the exposure. We should probably do that at least as often as we change our car oil. Is your maintenance light on?
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
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A classic stream of consciousness post. You lost me a couple times along the journey, but got me where I needed at the end. So it all works out. A lovely little reminder that could go a long way.
And of course you name your cars.