That picture.

December 19, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

That picture.
The bravery of that AP photographer. The poise.
The white walls, the black suit, the art on the walls, pictures.
That picture.
I wonder if I would show such bravery and poise in such circumstances. I hope I never find out.
Today was a snow day for us, crowning a weekend of winter wonderland and sweet things to come. We were running errands. I was getting my hair colored. Standing there while the kids were getting their hair cut while I waited for the color to take, chatting with Ellie, the hairdresser from Nicaragua whom I’ve grown to love over my monthly vanity rendezvous, chatting about family and the cost of health insurance and how to make churros over the cup of coffee she always offers while we wait, but today she was cutting the kids’ hair and I checked my phone for news and there was the news, and that picture. The picture was going viral on social media, on its way to a Pulitzer, someone among all the photojournalists reacting on a friend’s social media page said. That picture, a punch in the gut.
Eight shots, shouting “Don’t forget Aleppo!, Don’t forget Syria!” The young man, so sharply dressed, shouting and threatening the crowd after shooting the Russian ambassador to Turkey, black against the white background, it all goes so fast and there is that picture, a photographer was there and what he did is incredible. The picture so crisp in such a tense situation, and the contrast, the clash of black and white, the face of rage against the outstretched body of the ambassador, the suit flowing, the finger raised, nothing else and everything is there.
The elegant and sober setting and this young man, his rage, but he is so composed, look at his trigger finger, somebody else on that photojournalists’ thread on social media said, he has his finger outstretched and not actually on the trigger, while throwing the Tawhid hand sign, the universal raised index finger sign that ISIS has adopted and twisted, the Tawhid the belief in the oneness of god, but for ISIS a sinister signifier of extremist rejection of any and all other views.
That picture won’t let me sleep. What bravery in that photographer and what an image.
In its perfection it reminds me of James Nachtwey’s images of the Somalia famine and how their beauty raised a storm of ethical questions among us photojournalists but ultimately prevailed: in our job as visual communicators, the reality of the horrors we may be called to cover and convey demands no less than that quality, and far from glorifying horrors and making us insensitive to them, powerful and beautiful images are the best tools we have to bear witness.
That picture is already an icon.
Here in my world I had taken a picture of an angel.

Just starting.

December 7, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

In a moment of rare quiet solitude this morning I was reading a New Yorker profile of Pedro Almódovar and when I got to the part where he talks about losses, and how he feels them differently now that he’s older, it made me reflect on the milestone I just passed, turning fifty. After a week of sheer joy with friends, basking in their love and partying as if I were twenty, it is time to start reflecting: those symbols, milestones, rituals, these heightened steps on the chaotic and haphazard and uncontrollable path of our lives. Turning thirty was a momentous time; I had made it a symbol and a hope, the day when I would start freeing myself from what was tying me down.
When I turned thirty I stopped feeling sorry for myself and my handicap (I turned deaf around my mid-twenties from a pool of bad genes) and decided to rescue an abysmal self-image (becoming a photographer better to hide) and I started opening my eyes. When I turned thirty I started rediscovering the world of sound and talk, and the social world I had been slowly leaving, digging my own hole out of fear and shame; I started consulting surgeons to find out if a minor birth defect that had come to define my life could be addressed (it could not, and so it is, and it stopped defining my life); I started taking charge, and even if I skipped and fell often as I ran, I went on running with eyes wide open and as I turn fifty I’m just finally learning to fly.
The wild rosebush in the driveway is still blooming in subfreezing temperatures, calling to me as I look out the kitchen window.
Eyes wide open I'm learning to fly and  taking nothing for granted. The leaves crunch under my feet in the morning and are ringed by frost, shades of brown and white. The fog is lifting, and as I start to fly I want to take others by the hand, better to feel the air in my lungs. I am flying free and growing strong, and I am teaching my sons to do the same, take others by the hand as they soar - no time, no time to wait fifty years. It is grey and cold today, winter is settling, and we’re learning to fly together in the little bungalow, drab outside with all the colors inside.
There’s no stopping us, the sky is clear above the winter clouds and the image is coming into focus, and we’ll be flying high because these times demand it and the losses feel acute when you’re older but they’ve always been, dead by overdose at the age of nineteen he was, when last night he was playing the piano with me - wide-eyed thirteen-year-old.
It is not just about turning fifty and hoping for fifty-five more, seeing it all clearer and sharper now, it is about coming into focus, assessing the essential, art and ideas and actions hand in heart in hand.
I’m just starting.

Almost fifty.

November 26, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I’m almost fifty.
It doesn’t matter much to anybody but me. I’ll still get up in the morning and make lunch boxes, feed the cats and the hens and wake up the kids, plan meals and go buy groceries and cook, go around on my bike, give tutoring lessons to support myself until I can do that through photography.
One day, when I’m fifty-one.
(I couldn’t write these past weeks. The election just floored me, then spurred me to action, with a passion and urgency that has left no time left for writing.)

Baroque.

October 27, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

It’s Halloween. It’s almost Halloween, three days left, the kids made costumes from scratch, and I did nothing. From paper bags and cereal boxes, recycled plastic and paper, and much thought, and what sounded like endless debate between themselves, and urgency, because they are at that age still, not just quite over that age where it truly matters.
This is what the week looks like. I take a picture of their costumes in the baroque mess of my house.That and a friend from a buried past visiting in a whiff, a photographer friend, a Mom of two boys, accomplished and questioning, working on, work that matters, meaningful and beautiful work.
That the thought of the future opening, light with possibilities, just like that, and the engrossing sight and smell of fall, sweet and acrid, the relief.

Looking through the lens.

October 24, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

It is an evening like a rainbow.
The girls are playing in the neighbor’s yard, all these girls, friends, the ones from the neighbor in the back and the ones next door, so I tell the boys and they come out running, running to Addie’s blond ponytails and Soveryn’s brown pigtails, and her big sister Klaye’s caramel skin is glowing in the fading light against her blue shirt, the bright yellow pompoms from this weekend’s Homecoming parade that Lidia swerves around stand out against the grass, and Dylan rushes back in to our house saying I’ve got to get ready for battle and when he rushes back out I can’t see his face, he’s all ninja. The grass is turning brown in patches but it is still fair outside.
I have the urge to take pictures of all this exuberance, of the mundane joy of living right here now, in the soft dusk of a fall Monday, the myriad colors of their faces, and there is the fulfillment of using the new camera, a newer refurbished camera I marvel at like a kid, and we’re all out there, Jason, my neighbor, and I and all these kids, and he says I just enjoy watching the show.
Dinner will be yesterday’s pasta and a green smoothie, eat your vegetables, be happy, there’s the new camera and all the colors of our lives.
I see my life better through a camera. It makes everything taste better to my heart’s eyes.

Celebrations.

October 20, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I celebrate the little things, and rejoice in them. This is what I wanted to write about tonight.
The struggles feel real, they sting and they may hurt but they are necessary and ephemeral, just like the laughter, the wild laughter of Nicolas.
Nicolas struggles with low self-esteem and told me last night in a fit of crying that he thinks nobody loves him. It breaks my heart. This is what I wanted to write about tonight.
I celebrate the little things and the struggles not because I have to but because they are my tapestry. After I talked to him for seemed like forever and he went to sleep a little calmer, Nicolas woke up smiling and the day went on breathing lighter.
The day was full of work and meetings, the boys were at cross-country practice and it had turned cold, and I drove over even though it was not my carpooling day to bring them their water bottles, for they had forgotten them this morning. The night was coming fast as they ran back toward us, a coach and some parents, and their silhouettes were vague. They felt cold but they were warm from running. Nobody lingered. Afterward we drove home and they sang in the car, and we ate the dinner I had made yesterday, rice and bean soup and a cookie pie I made also because the oven was already warm from baking the bread.
This is it.
Earlier there was the light on the fading grape leaves on the porch, resplendent in the moment, asking me to give thanks, and rest in that.
It is all in that moment.

Friends.

September 30, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Last week end was endless.
Old friends came to visit on Saturday, and ended up staying the whole day, and the day seemed to stretch and fill and grow, taking up all those years of absence in, and as the week started it felt as if it had been much more than just a day, every moment lived fully in it, as they stayed on and the hours went by and we talked endlessly around the kitchen table, after they emergency-babysat the boys while I went to a photo shoot in the morning and came back two hours late, here they were, early in the morning last Saturday, twenty-two years later, knocking on the door, looking sounding laughing the same, and we picked up the conversation where we must have left it, all those years ago, between here and Palestine, or is it Paris.
Good friends are like magic: they do away with time.
Twenty-two years and it’s like yesterday.
Dick was a graduate student in the Photojournalism program at Mizzou, like me. He is now a managing editor at an established magazine. He and Kathy introduced me to their daughter. She goes to Mizzou, too, and to the Journalism sequence there, closing the loop of our lives in a wink.
We used to get together, a group of grad students and then some, for Sunday brunches that lasted forever and involved reading poetry and talking about art, when we were not eating or cooking or fervently discussing photography, or world affairs. What I do remember most is a feeling, and the sound of the laughter we shared, and that there was always coffee.
This was twenty-two years ago. Last Saturday we had lots of coffee, and French cheese, and we sat around the kitchen table for hours on end.
They had to go back the next day but it doesn’t matter, they’re here.
Good friends are like magic.