Point of View, and one car trip

This is another photo by Norman Rhee, taken when I was 15. Maybe I was sixteen, because I have a summer birthday and that peach tree looks pretty busy behind me. Holly said she liked it, so I've brought it here.


There's another from that day I really like, of me sitting on top of that VW, and if I ever come across it I'll scan that too. You might think I would keep that set all in one place, but that's not my style of packrattery. If I keep all my scissors in one place, I wouldn't have any close at hand in every room, and I might lose them all at once. Better not to keep all my photos in one basket, I guess I figure.

Anyway, I scanned that as part of some requested documentation of what I looked like when I wrote to David Bowie. The color photo in the blog post below is before I wrote. Debbie had brought the albums on that visit. The one above was the summer after, I think. Or the autumn after, maybe.

Norman was nice to have taken those and given me copies.

After Holly wrote that she liked the photo of me between the cars, I looked at it again. Holly is two years older than I was in that photo, and I think of her as young. I remember the things I knew and thought in the seasons of those photos. I was young, but I was full of life and ideas and words and music and art, and then I remember that Holly is too, but she's seen and done more than I had. So that puts me in quiet awe of Holly, again.

I hear Marty downstairs talking to his girlfriend, Ashlee. Kirby is in Austin, maybe taking his visiting girlfriend to lunch. They're big, and grown, and real people who look at photos of me when I was younger than they are now. A shift, in me. A continuum for them, but a new perspective for me.


The Best of 2009 item for December 19:

Car ride. What did you see? How did it smell? Did you eat anything as you drove there? Who were you with?

On September 10, I rode with Pam and Cyrus Sorooshian, their middle daughter, Roxana, and my oldest, Kirby, from their home in Los Alamitos to Laguna Beach, and then on to San Diego for the Good Vibrations conference. Kirby and Roxana were carrying on a quiet flirtation. We had stopped in Laguna Beach so that Kirby could see the World of Warcraft art exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum. We had lunch there too, and they gave my food and Kirby's to the wrong people, so we waited a long time, but it was very pleasant company and the day was nice and we weren't in a great rush to get to the hotel, except that Keith, Marty and Holly and arrived earlier than they had expected, having driven from Albuquerque while Kirby and I both flew to Long Beach.

How did it smell... there were succulents in front of stores on the main street/highway, as we walked, and they were like some we have at home, in pots, but these were gargantuan. Some had blooms. I think it smelled like trees, and the wet air of sea-level places with oceans. Mostly I saw Kirby, because that's where I chose to look, and I was really excited to be with him after a long separation.

I blogged some about that in September. Clicking the photo would get you more of that day.