Commentary: I’m just an old-fashioned girl with a camera

What do you think is the best invention ever?

What first might come to mind is the wheel. Or sliced bread.

But I am talking about the best invention of modern times, for you, personally. Not world-shaking things like television, the computer, the Internet, airplanes or even the smart phone, although your personal favoritism might start and stop with one of those.

You’d think my favorite would be electronic word processing, but it isn’t. Although it sure beats our old Underwood!

For awhile recently, I said the two best inventions of modern times were the GPS and the DVR — definitely excellent conveniences.

My mother, in her “modern times” in the 1950s, said the permanent wave was the best invention. She said that, even though she had to sit hooked up to a medieval-looking torture device with electrically wired clamps attached to the curlers that heated the chemicals and set the permanent wave. You’d think her fave would have been the electric washing machine.

In my sister’s modern times, she thought the Selectric typewriter was the invention to end all inventions. Eventually Carolyn converted to a Mac, leaving 35 bankers boxes of poetry among her “wordy” goods.

But back in our childhood — when we both had been subjected to the barbaric beauty parlor wave — Carolyn thought the cold wave was the best invention. My sister was beyond perming her own hair when she was in high school, but she had the patience to give both my mother and me our Toni perms.

What a mess! Tight curlers, chemical solution dripping into my eyes and down my neck and Mother asserting that “It takes pains to be beautiful.”

Beautiful?

The photograph of me in grammar school with the tight, uncomb-able curls is etched in my memory.

And that leads to my all-time favorite invention: the camera. I thought my first Brownie box camera was the most precious thing any kid could own. The black-and-white negatives were the size of the photo (eight to a roll of film), so the pictures were crisp and clear. For years thereafter, my father stuck with his accordion Kodak with the push button at the end of a cable.

My mother would send pictures to her mother and sisters in Chicago, and in due time they would be returned and attached with little black corners to the pages of the family photo album, along with pics of our 1950 Buick with Dynaflo, my sister’s graduation with me wearing her mortar board, my brother in his Air Force uniform, my parents in front of the first house they owned.

When I think of my family, I don’t bring their faces to mind. I bring to mind the photos they were in. Like Daddy with Mother, seated on the bicycle I got the year I turned 12. I’ve looked at the old photos so many times that photo-memories have replaced the real people in my mind’s eye.

I am an inveterate recorder of family events. Our family accumulated more than 30 photo albums. The offspring love to page through them to see what their parents looked like at their ages. I think of family occasions, and there they all are, in my head, our children, our grandchildren, and our great grandchildren.

I never went on a trip without documenting every sight (another 30-plus albums), usually with my husband Lee in the middle of the picture. Now that he’s gone, I think of a trip and there he is in my inner vision, in front of Le Mont San Michel, atop St. Peter’s in Rome, or on the Great Wall of China.

Taking pictures has become a breeze compared with our earliest travel days when Lee carried all the apparatus for me. With my digital camera, I don’t have to have dozens of rolls of film processed. Now I take thousands of photos on a disk no bigger than a nickel, and I can decide which pictures to have printed.

I resist using the cell phone that my kids made me get. And I still read real books, too. I’ll never take to an electronic reader.

I’m just an old-fashioned girl, with a camera.

A Corona del Mar resident, LIZ SWIERTZ NEWMAN is the author of “A Widow’s Business.”