I got an Icon Camera

"Shipped to Rochester" means different things in different contexts. If you were an Orioles fan in the heyday of the team, their triple A farm club was the Rochester Red Wings, and plenty of great players - Don Baylor, Bobby Grich and Doug DeCinces among them - had to spend a couple of extra years riding the minor-league bus because guys like Frank Robinson, Davey "Dum-Dum" Johnson and Brooks Robinson were up here in the majors, not going anywhere. It was to to be the fate of many a young ballplayer to get their shot at the Big Show, only to fall short of expectation and be farmed out to Rochester.

Rochester, NY, was also the name of the town on the thousands of rolls of Kodachrome film that my father shot of the various undertakings we undertook. (That sentence might require some fine tuning.) Kodak was located in Rochester, and it's from there that we get the sad news that Kodachrome, once the ne plus ultra of blank film, will not be produced any longer, what with everyone running around taking all their pictures on digital cameras, cell phones, and, probably before much longer, their digital wedding rings (free idea for some entrepreneur: a ring that has a digital IMAGE of a diamond!)

Over the years, Kodachrome became the film famed for recording images both wonderful and horrific. That pretty picture of an Afghan woman with haunting eyes...the Zapruder footage of John Kennedy's assassination, and countless others. But now, everyone's gone digital, and film - along with the lightmeters, and the other equipment people used to pull out while taking 15 minutes to take a photo of the family dog - is stuck in drawers somewhere.

Matter of fact, we have an old film camera in a kitchen drawer that we were using right up 'til the minute we got our first digital camera, and as Peggy suggested just the other night, we really ought to pop out that roll of film and get it developed. You never know what we might find on there.