How about one more.
Some friends were camping at a nearby state park with their kids... kind of one of those vacations where dad can still get up and go to work if needs be. Huh? I dunno. But anyway... we drove out one afternoon to just hang out with ‘em for awhile.
So we're sittin' around the ol' campfire just yackin' while the two young folk and their tag-along-cousin, Austin, were snappin' pictures with mom's digital P&S, passing it back and forth, laughing at the little screen on the back and basically annoying the heck out of everyone.
Finally, Tag-along gets curious, looks at me and asks, "Can I see YOUR camera?"
Instantly and in unison, every adult present barks, "No! ..... No, no, no!" Then they all start tag-team bashing the poor kid. "Don't EVEN let him touch your camera. He breaks EVERYTHING he touches. I'm not kidding. He's a walking disaster. He's only twelve and he's on his 4th bicycle… broke an anvil once... his mom only feeds him on PAPER plates!"
"Ah, he won't hurt it," I replied as I handed it over to him [gently]. The crowd gasped and then fell into total silence. Every eye around the campfire was locked on the young terror, Austin, and the Zorki.
I tried my hardest to put on my best fake “He’s-a-good-boy-I’m-not-worried” grin. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, "Punk, this is a 1956 first year Zorki 4. No doubt the only one you'll ever see in you whole, miserable, calamity-infested life. If you so much as even breath on it wrong, I'm going to hang you from that tree over there with the brown leather Gordy's Neck Strap that's on it and pummel you so bad with the rest of it, they won’t be able to identify you in a DNA lab!"
Of course, the inevitable next question had to come. “Can I take a picture with it?”
“Sure!” I confidently replied, although I think my voice may have trembled ever so slightly, with a barely recognizable squeak changing “sure” into a two-syllable word. “I’ll show ya.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the oldest daughter of our friends reach slowly for her SLR that I had given her some months ago, and bring it to her eye to catch a shot of me giving the Master of Disaster quick photog instructions on focusing. I’m in mid-sentence when he realizes he’s about to have his picture taken. He suddenly jerks the FSU to his eye, aims it back at the other camera-bug and begins to feverishly mash everything that feels like a button on top.
He finally hits the right one. “Ker-schlam!” the Russian photographic instrument fires with the vibration of gears, levers and slamming shutter curtains pulsing through his pansy pre-pubescent fingers and freckled cheekbone. The immediate look on his face was evidence he’d never before heard anything remotely like that come from mom’s digicam. His eyeballs snapped out on their stems and his mouth fell limply open though no oxygen was going in or coming out. Ever so gradually he eased the Zorki back down to his lap while his unblinking gaze on me could easily be read that he was wondering how many nanoseconds he had to remain on this Earth.
I didn’t say a word. I waited, staring back, memorizing his expression. In what seemed to take an eternity, he at last mustered the courage to speak.
“Is it broken?”
Here's the result of Austin's catastrophe.
>>>
) "Oh a Land camera?" "No, roll film." "Ah, those were nice too." "I like to work for my pictures." He then gave me a thumbs-up and went on his way. It just struck me as interesting to run into someone who associated a folder with polaroid film. Been awhile since I'd seen someone do that... 
