kodachrome

the paul simon song i knew by heart -- but the slide film was a mystery to me.
i was deep into black-and-white photography in the '70s, the mysteries of the darkroom, the magic of images appearing from the white photo paper like spirits from another world.
the smells, the machines, the hardware drew me into seeing the world's shades of gray.
so seeing the rich color of my husband's family's collection of slide films was a delicious shock.
the pictures his father had taken over the years -- birthdays, holidays, annual camping trips -- were not just well-composed; they looked as if they'd been shot yesterday.
it seemed impossible they'd frozen time so perfectly.
terry knew the images by heart, since part of his family's tradition was regular home movie nights, sometimes silent films with popcorn and ragtime music, other times they relived the past by watching slide shows of their younger selves.
to me, they were a revelation.
it wasn't just the scenes i loved so much, the forever-young faces. it was the whole story of what the pictures meant. one in particular i especially love. it's terry at 1 or so, at the beach with his young, beautiful parents.
he wrote about it today on his Tumblr blog, on which he records the images his own eye captures, and occasionally tells a story. today's was one i loved so much i had to repost.

http://thebonaventuretapes.tumblr.com/

If you walk slow enough.....

...you'll often stumble upon delightful worlds, just a little off the beaten path. like the backyard greenhouse business of jack herman mitchell. Story: http://patch.com/A-jsxj

oy!

apologies to all seven readers (i cherish you, each and every one!) for being away from this blog for so long. i created it just to See What One Was -- and then realized that like any living thing, it needs to be fed.
oops! bad blog mommy! : (
so the good news my lack of wordage here means the wordage offstage has been happening apace, flowing like a good (stuttery, but constant) river, and therefore i can't -- as a writer who hopes (don't we all?) to someday Leave Something Behind -- be too mad about that.
nevertheless, i miss the idea of my delightful seven blessed readers, who signed up to hear What I Might Have To Say (and i type that in full knowledge of the fact that i have been (kindly) prodded to consider that perhaps i overuse the capital letter thing for emphasis. o twell. sue me!
but i digress.
aside from wanting to re-jump into the pool of cyberconversation, i just wanted to note that i LOVED this whole rant:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/qmoone/2011/06/mr-naipaul-and-becoming-a-writer/
and regret like the dickens that i ever let a former books editor insert a VSN reference into the LEDE of a book review that had nothing to do with him.
what can i say? i was young, impressionable, and stupidly swayed by males who seemed to know what they were doing.
thank heavens i'm old enough to know better.