At the airport there was a man who looked just like Dad waiting for the same flight I was. It was disturbing. Similar blue eyes, (not quite as intense) which sometimes stared off into the distance just like Dad’s wide-set eyes would. It made my heart ache. He had been gone six years. In spite of our differences over the years, I could feel how I loved him.
January 8, 2006
Dad at 1989 reception
I love our homes, past and present – painting them, rewiring them, planning improvements in them, coming home to them, and going to sleep in them. For years I have taken photo walks so I can enjoy all the creativity in their homes, their yards and yard sculptures, the trees that salute or enfold them, and the experiments in form they show.
Finding, renting, then buying our first house (on Buena) was great. We could enhance it with book-matched redwood floors, painted flowers on bathroom tiles, self-designed and made kitchen cabinets with glass doors. We got to knock down a teetering garage to build an artist studio and darkroom, doing all of the finish carpentry. After moving to our Santa Clara Ave house, we got to do similar enhancements and more.
There were the usual owner crises – a flooded basement, a deluge from the upstairs bath, a big section of rot in the studio bathroom, the month of winter cold without heat or hot water while a foundation was rebuilt — they don’t seem so bad in hindsight.
Our home is a workplace for both of us. Much productive and enjoyable time is spent in the woodshop, studio, and computer/photography room. A dry basement means I don’t have to get rid of the media and creations from our kids, ourselves, and generations past. There’s never enough storage for art and photo prints though.
Home is also our gallery-in-progress, showing something we have just made or that we treasure. A full house!
Dreams have played a part in my life for as long as I remember. Childhood nightmares sent me to the therapist — in my dreams a light switch in my room wouldn’t turn on; then a fire started in the walls. In the 1960’s I did self-psychology experiments like making a timer alarm to see what I was dreaming throughout the night. I also tried to exert some control over my dreams by picturing what wanted as I went to sleep, with occasional success. I loved having ‘lucid’ dreams, where I realized I was dreaming. I still make use of this consciousness when I decide a dream is too scary and need to wake up. I still sporadically record a dreams, but rarely go back to reread them.
8/24/14
Sometimes when I look at our old photographs a deep nostalgia takes over. I see how a painful divorce and a daughter’s photographs undeveloped for years miraculously led to beautiful images and to terrific grandchildren. Some things like parenting came easier than expected, while other things like seizure recovery came harder. My connections with my family give me a platform to ride the ups and downs. My knowledge of mom and dad’s trials and lapses no longer tarnish the memories of warmth and support they gave us children.
I look forward from this good place and imagine with less fear the trials and setbacks our grown children may encounter in their 30’s and 70’s.
2/4/13
I’ve always been fascinated by how differently two eyes see compared to one alone. When I see a fantastic sight in the woods I close one of my eyes to see if it goes away. If so, it joins all the others that can only be remembered, not photographed with my single-eye cameras. I remember a beautiful bush I saw in the magnificent nursery/garden in Occidental. Dew-teared branches of different coloration wove themselves through the space before me. It failed the eye-closed test, getting squashed flat into a confusing tangle of dull lines. I tried to photograph the fronds anyway, with no success.
I’ve never succeeded in taking stereo pictures myself, but I sometimes enjoy those taken by others. I saw at the Smithsonian today many stereos taken by Carleton Watkins, and they were remarkable. He took beautiful large-format collodium/albumin prints of places like Yosemite that were widely appreciated, but he took even more stereo pictures. I perused a hundred or so that were shown via a computer with special glasses.
Not all of them were good. Sometimes they looked like paper cut-out trees or people standing in front of 2-dimensional mountains. I enjoyed the ones of Yosemite the most, of course, especially the reflecting pond stereos. I remember one titled Reflection of the Three Sisters. The quality of the water was just amazing. The presence of such calm water can only be sensed through clues left by a few floating twigs, but it looked shiny and deeply black. The peaks themselves look pale and lifeless at the top of the photo, but the reflected version shows them with full detail and contrast. A few tufts of grass in the extreme foreground add a lively texture. I understand what’s behind some of these features. I suspect that ultraviolet filters hadn’t been invented yet, so distant mountains looked hazy, while the reflection simply removed those polluting light waves.
I remember the transition to stereo that recorded music went though as well. By the late sixties rock music made such full use of it that listening with headphones sent the music rolling around. At least it rolled around quite a bit in my head.
Perhaps some day I will try to make my own pictures show the 3-dimensional quality that I appreciate so much in nature, so that textures and layered patterns can jump out at viewers like they do behind my always-searching eyes.
March 26, 2000
For years I’ve envied families who had diarists in their past, allowing them to tune into their thoughts — thoughts that are not captured in pictures. Thanks to my grandson’s school genealogy project I discovered a wealth of diaries in my own family. Marcel chose to explore why relatives first came to California in 1910. The mountains of photographs taken by JC Gordon, the photographer, couldn’t answer that question, but I did come upon a box of his personal diaries written as a young man. It was wonderful to see how honestly he portrayed his life. He wasn’t shy about describing his concern that his romantic time with Mina might be less sweet after they married, or that he was making a terrible mistake as they got on the train for California. Was he just throwing away his hard-earned money? ‘Well, we’ll see’.
Closer to home, Allegra kept a diary as well. Recently she reread parts and enjoyed seeing how her 5’th grade self wrote comments on her 4’th grade writings.
My cousin Lois has a very long shelf of her own diaries. She has taught many groups of women how to create personal writing. Now she sets up community events where older people are paired with younger to document and share their lives in a personal and community setting.
I confess I can’t get myself to write more than sporadically. Now I find I’m writing paragraphs in my mind, so I might as well write them out. I’m enjoying putting thoughts together in a loosely connected web of memories.
2/13/14
Each decade in my life seems to leave media behind.
When I was young I loved watching my dad cut vinyl records, the long thread coiling up on the floor. Our young voices were recorded that way. Those are in our basement. I also played with a wire recorder during therapy sessions, supposedly needed to treat my 10-year-olds nightmares. I never got to take those home.
High school photos (120 negatives) get printed, but left behind as I went to college
In college I recorded my ‘letters’ home onto 1/4″ tape, (good old Wollensak, which were then stored by my dad. I just recently got my tape deck together to make a digital copies. Very few pictures were taken during those years except for trips.
In my graduate days, I used all kinds of media. For research with sweet baby Heida on language learning I borrowed a 1″ wide tape recorder and later a more standard 1/2″ reel video recorder. I also set up a video room for my encounter group research as well [pic]. Most of my beloved 60’s music went onto 1/4″ tape, copied from rental records. For pictures I mostly shot with a Rollei-flex 6×6, B&W.
Part of the pleasure when we built a studio behind Buena Avenue came from creating a small darkroom. I experimented with printing in color, but the process was finicky and the chemicals stinky. Still, I worked hard to get nice prints of our sweet Allegra.
Dusty film and videos are part of my life as well. I had taken 16mm film of Heida in the 60’s, but it was quite expensive.
For Allegra and Jeremy we shot 8mm (silent), super 8 (poor sound), then later analogue video and finally digital video.
Three times I challenged myself by preparing ‘video’ compendiums of each child as they turned 21. For Heida, I had to project old film to re-shoot onto video, editing in-camera. I don’t know if that film is viewable in 2014. For Allegra there was a lot of hunting for footage and converting formats. For Jeremy, thankfully, the conversions were easier so I could concentrate on the storytelling.
My digital photography starting in 2003 hasn’t gotten dusty, but that’s another story.
8/30/2004
I’ve enjoyed radio in so many different ways, and I love the way that radio is still exciting. It brought me adventure shows like ‘Green Hornet’ and ‘Sergeant Preston’ on an old radio in my bedroom when I was young. Dad helped me build a crystal set with a beautiful piece of galena. I would hide away the set to create mysterious sounds for friends. [pic here]
As a teenager, FM radio helped me discover Zen (Alan Watts), Rock-n-Roll, and classical music in my bedroom at night. In my garage I would listen on the AM radio I had built.
Now public broadcasting fills 1-2 hours of my day, mostly through podcasts. Radio, serves up better news, analysis, and music interviews than I can get anywhere else. Radio is still the backbone of progressive ideas, IMO. It’s still very much alive.
8/26/14