Farewell to my president.

January 11, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

Watching President Obama talk last night for the last time, how bittersweet, and emotional.
Despite all the inevitable disappointments, because the world is so much more complicated and messy than we know, despite the shortcomings and all that with which we didn’t agree or in which we hope he had done more, Obama has carried himself throughout it all with such grace and poise and intelligence that it is hard not to feel acutely the pain of losing him as our leader and our voice in the world.
It has been an honor to become a citizen under his watch, to receive his letter welcoming me as a citizen of this nation.
A citizen.
I will take his words and work to carry them far, do the work of a citizen, roll up my sleeves and try to make this a better world, engage people and educate and help, but also work the best way I know, making pictures and sharing them and hoping that they help, however minimally, by providing a glimpse, a thought, in someone else’s world, and thereby advance the cause of tolerance, respect, inclusion, and love.
But it is in speaking about his family, his wife, his daughters, that Obama perhaps touched me the most.
Not just because his love and his respect and his dedication make me see the possibility of what could be, but because they make me see the possibility of what should be, in this so personal realm, the seed of our wider world.

The milk.

January 6, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

The diminutive waves on the surface of the milk when it is heating up. Their undulation. The folds as if of fresh-laundered sheets. Satin white. Dark bubbles lurking underneath.
It snowed yesterday, and it is achingly cold. The kids made a snowman that looks like a teepee; its hat and scarf and the two juggling balls they gave it for eyes were still there today when we checked after school. We had hot cocoa for dinner, because it felt like it, with the French bread the store bakes fresh in the evening. I stood watching the milk lest it burn and spill.
I stood there watching the little satin waves come up and dance like flames, soft and quick and supple, and disappear. Then the milk came to a near-boil and I turned off the heat. It was time to eat. The spell had come and gone, its job done.
It is a new year. The holidays are hard but these were fine, as they come, even joyous, and the happiness in small things still grows, in me, amidst the anguish of the new order and the monumental waves sweeping the world, and me, migrations and dislocations, hatreds, divisions, all the ugly, but also the yearning for connection, and the stubborn progress I want to believe we are still making in the direction of lofty goals like acceptance and respect.
Even though I’m always drawn to the darkness in photographs, I find the unnecessary and beautiful perfection of the little waves on the surface of the milk one more reason to cultivate hope, and write.