New York!

April 3, 2016, Elmwood Park (New Jersey.)

Spring Break and I took the kids to New York.
The excuse was to take Dylan to the Metropolitan Opera after he surprised my by loving every minute of the performance at the Missouri Theater last month, but who needs an excuse?
Central Park in early bloom and almost winter light, the magic, the hustle of tourist hell Times Square where my friend and host Kristine works, the views from the Empire State Building, the Staten Island ferry ride, the musicians on the subway platforms, the illegal performers in the subway cars, pretzels with mustard and too much salt on the way to the Met, sitting in the Metropolitan Opera house, smelling the smells of New York and going back in time, watching the boys in all their wonder, and their kindness (walking by a guy asking for “money for food,” they said we should help him so we turned around and stood in line and in the rush to get him a sandwich and a hot drink.)
Life is beautiful hardly sums it up. I try to grab a memory or two with my phone, I want more than anything to be in this moment and be elated and grateful.

Does it matter?

March 21, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Last week I had a routine outpatient procedure at the hospital and it made me think of death. Of course.
What if I didn’t wake up? Things happen after all. And things did not happen, of course, and I woke up fine and was up and going and wondering what to do with the rest of the day, which I had set aside in case, well, something happened, or I felt the way I was told I would feel, woozy, tired, which I didn’t, and I couldn’t even make myself feel productive and clean the car because I had done that the day before, waiting for the effects of the medicine to take hold, nor could I reschedule my tutoring appointments, too late, so I just paid bills and straightened paperwork and cooked, because another effect of the procedure is that I had not eaten since two days before.
Death was out, spaghetti was in.
And so that’s my life.
Frantic and somewhat predictable: and not even a photograph, in those last two weeks, although I have been, as I always am, looking at a lot of photographs, and constantly thinking about them, and why we are taking them and what they mean and what it means and if it matters in the end. Are all photographs  good, no matter, all the million pictures people take, with their cell phones, the million selfies, are they good pictures just because they exist, as someone on social media old me, rebelling against applying any “hierarchy” on art? Does it matter? Why?

A piece of myself is gone.

February 28, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

A woman I loved died this morning in my hometown, in the South of France.
Fanette was one of my closest friends' mother. We grew up together, Zaza, her sister and I, our parents close friends, our childhoods a common territory, Fanette a constant presence.
The afternoons spent in the cavernous stone house deep in our old medieval village, two little girls playing in the stone shed full of magic off the patio, later watching dubbed American TV series in the cluttered room under the roof where Fanette sometimes accompanied us, later still, adolescents, listening to punk rock on the radio in Zaza’s room, her sister Sophie not quite as close but still. Fanette, towering in the art supplies store she owned a few blocks from their home, the smell of paint and pastels, her tall, bony, straight figure commanding and slightly frightening.
It is as if I had grown up in that family as much as in my own’s, Fanette’s taste for traditional French cooking the kind my mother never cooked, her brisk manner, the reassurance of her total authority, Fanette and Jacques, always uttered in that order by my mother and father, their friends Fanette et Jacques, these words mapping my childhood as much as the rooms of my home and roads of my village, the old dark stone village house full of paintings, sculptures and artifacts that secretly scared me, the family were avid collectors and art lovers, the cavernous house and its smells, the smell of polished wood, of stone, of the magical territory of my child mind, that house the realm of my childhood, Fanette, its implacable captain.
She died this morning, at home, surrounded by her family, peacefully my mother told me.
My friend lost her mother, and I a piece of myself too.

Silent partner.

February 14, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Nicolas has been struggling with attention at school all this week, and with frustration at home, the old sibling rivalries, frustration and anger turned into screeching cries, triggered by nothing. 
For me this means a lot of thinking and agonizing about how to teach my kids the emotional and social skills they need to develop into emotionally and socially stable, fulfilled and happy adults, it means a lot of thinking back into my own childhood and how my own insecurities developed, and stayed, and whether I can successfully teach those so important skills to my kids when I’m so unsure about mastering them myself. It means a lot of time spent parenting, and less for photography.
Being a single mother means the responsibility for all this, and everything else, rests on me, and just me. Sometimes the pressure feels just overwhelming. But there is the grace, the daily drop of happiness, and gratitude, the grace and the rain and looking up at the grey skies, swirling in the cries.
Grace: my children. They were planned; they have been my priority since I brought them into this world; they come first.
This means sometimes, most of the time, my days are filled with them, and work, and photography goes under the surface, although it is always there, like a friend walking by my side, my silent partner.

January breeze.

February 7, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

We camped out in the total rehab of a house on an air mattress that made my back screech, amidst the rubble and the dirt, with the tall windows open because it smelled of paint, and there was happiness.
The weather warm enough for spring, I opened the windows to let the breeze in, late January and it’s like sneaking out of winter for a night, and breathed in happiness, all together again, so uncomfortable and so perfectly joyful, silly, and in the morning, when I was scrubbing on, there was a work of art: right there the windows in the kids room, neatly covered in newspaper because of painting the walls, and the light through the print, an ephemeral work of art, beauty.
What makes a life worth living?
Streams of simple happiness in the unexpected, two boys, raising them to be caring, and love, or maybe just the light through the window, and the caress of an impossible January breeze.

All that matters.

January 16, 2016, Columbia, (Missouri.)

A week of working on a photography project is a good week.
The sheer enchantment of it, for it has been so long, and it is rejuvenating to be simply working, but also to be working on something that is relevant to the day’s discourse and important to tell, something you feel strongly about. It is what we’re here for, after all, all of us, photographers, mothers, writers, laborers, artists, brothers, teachers, activists, all of us toiling at the day’s work, all of us and it is all that matters, in our last hour, the helping, inspiring, making this shared world a little kinder, a little fairer, or just a little more beautiful.
A week of the usual daily chores, a good week at school for the boys, praise and pride, an uneventful week at work, but for seeing small kids’ minds struggling and growing, fascinating, and the work from my heart and soul, not much to report but a sense of accomplishment I am ever grateful to have thanks to the art of photography.
That is all for this week, and it is a lot.

Endless laughter.

January 9, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

I survived the holidays and all the new year’s wishes of joy and love, especially love.
I’m ready to move on, I’ve packed away the nostalgia, accepted the fact that nothing supported it but emptiness and longing.
The road opened up again, I’ll see where it goes, it is mine alone.
The holidays, Texas and my sister-in-law, my only sister, and an emotional landscape I know too well, a landscape where I get lost and can’t find myself, but also a landscape of family, or the closest to family I can claim on this side of the Atlantic, and which is about to become a loaded field of memories and discarded opportunities, and in the end just nothing.
My sister-in-law lives in a small town east of Dallas and has built a life there, started a family, a business. I could fit in and would probably be able to grow my photo business a lot faster thanks to her connections to the Latino community and beyond. I never will because the last thing I want now is to get closer to what used to be. The road here ended.
I’ll stay away and I’ll dream of much farther away,  there is always New York and going back in time there, I was young in New York in the eighties, the grit and the possibilities, but I’ll stay in the Midwest and I’ll keep on taking life a step at a time, I’ll move to St Louis come spring so the kids can enroll in a public charter French immersion school there and I’ll hope for the best, I’ll laugh my head off, I’ll call my friends, I’ll try to earn some money doing what I love, taking pictures, speaking in images, and maybe St Louis will see the business finally take off, and that would be my oh I wish for this year, after healthy happy kids, gratitude in every breath and endless laughter.