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I could take this week seriously and try to choreograph a self portrait for the element “air,” or I could just dig something up from yesterday’s photovault and call it a day. Which is just what I have done, because it has been just that kind of day, so far. I wonder what everyone else has been submitting for the “Earth, Air/Wind and Fire” challenge…
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We are chomping through granny smiths at Moss Beach, watching the tide slip back over the reef, watching a school group return to their bus up the hill. I ask Ford if he is excited about starting school in the fall. He is. But he hesitates, then continues that he is going to miss coming to the beach as often as we do.
Then I start to daydream about having a boat in Santa Cruz for the weekends, a swaying slumberpad, beach hub, newhaven.
More SPC.
A Saturday afternoon and we’re walking through the sweaty corridor of Haight street in San Francisco. We are passing a man who wants money for weed. I smell nothing but incense and urine and pizza and sweat, and I wonder if Haight will ever grow up out of its Tibetan-American phase, whether Chas will ever grow out of his nipple fascination.
No, and probably not.
See more street photography at SPC.
The osmotic veil between us is sometimes so imperceptibly thin,
that it seems to me a nod to maternal reflex and the power of biology to connect human souls.
You can see more body parts at SPC.
With little difference to the stiff neck I felt yesterday morning, I drove the kids down to the beach. All the elation that nearly winded me on the drive down to Half Moon Bay fizzled once I started lifting Chas out of deep tide pools and stretching to capture fossils embedded in the rocks. I remember the swirling panorama of beached seals and hungry surf, thinking, This is a very bad place to be with a stiff neck and two exploring preschoolers.
So I let both of the kids clamber their way back to the beach on their own (Chas is getting surprisingly nimble) and then rested in the tent while they bouldered and threw rocks at the incoming tide. This overexposed shot is taken from my little infirmary. I like the way it captures the heat, unforgiving light and pain (although I might be the only one to look at this picture and feel it). It also has a nice retro tint. What’s your impression? I’m obliged to use these flickr tools for SPC’s current challenge but I’m not sure I’d use these tools in my own. It lacks authenticity. Not sure I like that, although it has a home somewhere.
My advice to anyone waking up in the morning with a stiff neck is to traction yourself to a board for the rest of the day and hook yourself up to an IV and catheter. Don’t drive a long, winding road to the beach, set up a tent, wrangle children across the rocks at low tide and then press reverse. That was a recipe for disaster. Damon says it wouldn’t matter; that the muscle would spaz no matter what.
I wonder if he’s right.
If you want to learn more about online photoediting tools , check out a gallery exhibiting some at SPC.
Ambient temperature outside. The screen door flapping continuously as I chase the kids chase the dogs chase the kids chase me around the house. I’m preoccupied with the tide of afterschool traffic whirring past our driveway, and the kids, puddingfaced and disheveled, monkeying around for the caravan of SUVs, all with their windows down, cheering them back. Where’s the dog? Where’s your bowl of chocolate pudding? Where’s Chas?
This is a shot we took during a ticklefest intermission, all on the sofa in our living room. I uploaded the image to a Hockneyizer Flickrtool website.
For the current challenge atSPC
Before the furniture arrived, there was a skateboard in an empty living room and me, in my adjacent studio, acting really silly.
When Ford was about six months old, and we were weary of living in a hotel in Connecticut, we slung our money into an Airstream trailer. If not just as an escape, we bought it so we could toodle around the East Coast for a while. We trailered it with a converted stepvan that had a wireless satallite atop the hood, which served as Damon’s workspace, and I’d follow the trailer around New England in our family car, birddogging through the convoluted Boston construction, around granite cliffs in Maine, along quaint historical neighborhood streets. I loved every part of the journey, even the perpetually damp and confining bathroom that served our family of three and any visiting guests.
During the days that Damon worked at the brick office in Middleton, Connecticut, Ford and I spent our mornings and afternoons at the beach. I’d jog along the trail, he’d fall asleep under the billowing mosquito net ofthe jogger, and when he awoke we’d hang out on the beach itself. He learned to crawl on the sands of Hammonassett State Park. I’d put gossamer ctenophores in his hand, and they’d glisten little rainbow hairs as they slipped through his fat fingers. He’d wave his hands through the floating garden of red and green algae, slick translucent stained glass that looked entirely edible. He’d put rocks in his mouth, I’d sweep them out.
During the middle of the day, when it was too hot to be outside, we’d be confined to the trailer. And this was all good and actually lovely when he took his afternoon nap. I would steam up a latte and write or read. But when he was restless, we went a little stir crazy in the 22 foot trailer.
In this photo, Damon caught us decompressing against the screen door one hot afternoon, when we were too chicken to leave our three-odd square feet of cold air-conditioning and head to the beach.
Last May, we downsized and sold the trailer where Ford spent most of his first year. I miss it dearly, but what’s shocking is that Ford misses it, too. The other day I asked him,
“What do you miss about the Airstream?”
“The stickers in the windows. And the bed with all the windows around it.”
I miss the bed, too. I miss the encapsulation of our family within a small space, streamlining our experience and always having home to return to at the end of a bust day exploring some foreign place. That’s why I dream of a sailboat, of taking the kids for a year or so around the world, when they’re old enough not to need a “time out dinghy” or a line of drying cloth diapers hanging from the mast.
See more enclosures at SPC.
