On the first night of Chanukah, Elijah received a digital camera from his grandparents. It's still hard for me to believe that digital cameras for kids are now standard middle-class holiday gift fare. But there it was, a fully-functioning hard plastic Fisher-Price digital camera. Thus far, this is definitely the highlight of Elijah's fine holiday haul, which has also included an encyclopedia of dinosaurs, a treasury of Curious George stories, a toy accordion, and a semi-educational video about the physics of rollercoasters.

As soon as Regina set up the camera, Elijah transformed into a gore-less Weegee, an unadventurous Margaret Bourke-White, a transitional neighborhood Ansel Adams, the Annie Leibowitz of the ordinary. He took hundreds of pictures that first night, pointing the camera, for instance, at a magazine on the coffee table and clicking shoot 20 times in a row. His face looked very serious, almost professional. He proved a tempermental artist, erasing whole rolls of film before we had a chance to see them.

Then he went into his bedroom and took a stuffed cat and a stuffed flamingo (who he calls JoJo and Elijah, respectively) off his bed. Elijah laid proxy JoJo and proxy Elijah on his bedroom carpet and captured their essence intensely and repeatedly, like he was Diane Arbus about to have pretentiously kinky sex with a guy played by Robert Downey, Jr. He erased all those pictures as well.

The next morning, we called Grandma and Opa to thank them for the present.

"I wuv it," Elijah said.

"Can you send some to me?" asked my mother, on the phone.

At that moment, Regina was getting a set of photos reading for public viewing.

"In a wittle bit," Elijah said. "We're downwoading them into the computer."

Elijah's skills need some development, as it were. About a third of the photos were either all black or all white, because he was taking the coffee table surface up too close, or blocking the lens with his finger. Most of the rest of the photos were blurred nonsense, and not artisitcally deliberate, either, like shots of his bedroom window at a weird angle, or a sliver of one of his shoes. Only two photos looked coherent. One was of Elijah's own face, and the other was of Hercules' butt.

Well, at least he's having fun. I am, however, going to have to destroy the picture of me that he surreptitiously snapped while I was on the john. L.A. may corrupt my son in many ways, but I am not going to let him become a paparrazo.

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