A blog about photography & transformative art
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Hot-house tomatoes come to market early in spring. This is too early for a tomato. Tomatoes herald the beginning of summer—real summer, not some fabrication designed to hurry along a year before its time. Hot-house tomatoes remind me of Christmas decorations that show up before Thanksgiving. Sadly, too many patrons of the farmer's market succumb to the temptation. "Look!" they say. "Tomatoes!!!!!" And they go buy the mealy, half-green half-real approximations of the real thing.
"There always seems to be something right around the corner in your paintings," my watercolor teacher used to tell me. "What is it that you are trying to find there?" she'd ask, looking over her glasses.
Hands are the most fascinating part of a farmer's market. This is a recent discovery of mine, thanks to the telephoto lens. I started watching the rummaging hands of market shoppers only a few weeks ago when I zoomed in to reveal a few paws hard at work searching through tomatoes—a show that I'd never noticed before. The hands are like puppet shows. Young, old, deliberate, or frantic, they dart around with anthropomorphic personality. Hands search for the perfect tomato. They grope for the reddest of cherries. Some remind me of the giant claws that grasp for treasure in those old arcade machines at amusement parks. Hovering over the green beans, they plunge down into the center of a huge pile of them. Up come the hands, dropping half their load as they maneuver the lode into plastic bags. Then they repeat the cycle, seemingly insatiable in their appetite for more.
My grandfather had a collection of fishing lures in his basement. I remember the wall upon which he displayed it. I can see it in my mind as clearly as this computer monitor upon which I write. Shiny objects with big, nasty hooks, the lures seemed beautiful and barbaric all at the same time. I hated seeing fish with hooks sticking out of their gills. I hated even more the detachment that many fishermen had to the pain that the fish seemed to experience. "They're cold-blooded," a childhood friend once said. "They don't feel any pain." Delusional thinking.
Living in suburbia is a sweet experience with the metallic aftertaste of Aspartame. I stand in my own shadow as steel SUVs shuttle the neighborhood children to and fro. The agendas of modern mothers leave me in their dust. Lessons. Little League. School. After School. 3:00 PM in this town is the Wild West.
We encounter other souls all the time. I barely know myself while the complex world passes me by. It doesn't stop me from wondering. Who are they? What is their story?
It was during the standoff with the rabbit that I met the quail. He was standing in the brush. In the fog. Deep in the dream of the morning I heard his song. Like the soft gauze of fog, his coo swirled around the hilltop. His beak opened with a smile. He laughed at the rabbit and me, wondering who would move first.
"Keep moving," I said to myself, almost aloud. I was retracing the steps of a hike I'd taken a few weeks before. Memory plays tricks. I had no map, just the sketchings of a currently-distracted mind. My head was trying to remember a trail set against azure skies. However, on this day there was a fog so thick I could barely see my feet. "Was this where I turned?" This time I said it out loud for sure.
"Just when you think nothing's going to happen, one day you wake up and it's all changed!" A wise pressroom foreman once told me this years ago when I in the printing business. Printing is filled with dysfunction and drama, one thing after another. Fights, angst, screaming. Days gone bad. We all thought we were caught up in never-ending suffering. Then, like the pressroom sage had foretold, one day I woke up and it all changed forever.
