Breakfast, photographs and blogs...

“A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.”

- Ansel Adams, American Photographer

Leah and I, as is often the case, were sitting and gazing into the darkened colorless shades of the early morning, waiting for the earth to rotate another few degrees, bringing the Sonoran desert into a beautiful and richly colored living canvas.

It was a warm morning, with a gentle wind coming from the south, bringing with it the subtle odor of bacon, eggs and syrupy pancakes…the unmistakable smell that, at least for me, turns on a bit of tummy growling, not so subtly reminding me that my engines wouldn’t mind a bit of fueling up.

Wait! Bacon, eggs and pancakes in the desert?? Yes sir, when the morning wind comes from the south, and it does not often do so, it brings with it this understated, yet unmistakable, aroma from Jerry Bob’s, an eatery a couple of hundred yards (.18km) down the road from our neighborhood.

Smell is a powerful memory tool, and brings with it a flood of past life experience, which in this case, made me think of boy scout campouts, breakfasts in the Canadian woods at our family cottage, breakfasts in some greasy spoon after a long and sleepless night somewhere…

Photographs…

The article said that most people do not look at photographs they have taken a second time, unless sharing them with someone else, or reminiscing at the loss of a friend or loved one with whom they had a meaningfully common experience…one sees a lot of this on social media.

I am not certain about ‘most people,’ but this is true for me. I open my photo albums when sending a picture to an old friend, or when I write home during an overseas adventure, but for the most part, my photos sit in an electronic library seldom seeing the light of day. On the odd occasion, I’ll open my photo folders and am reminded of someone dear to my heart and an event shared with them…it is the ‘odd occasion.’

When my sister Nancy was drifting away from us down the slippery slope of Alzheimer’s disease, she spent hours looking at family photographs, almost, I suppose, as if they would act as small anchor points onto which she could hold her mind steady and sanity intact.

When I take pictures, it is because I think I would like to remember the scene in front of me…remember how I felt in the moment the electronic blinking eye captured the scene.

Blogs…

I have been writing this weekly blog for nearly five years.  I began doing so because I thought it would be a platform to work out my philosophy of life…a place where, if I recorded things I was thinking, my life would find better focus…a little more meaning…perhaps anchor points in a world that seems to rush by so quickly that it looks to be ending almost before it began.

As it turns out, I have been writing ‘word photographs’ of life experiences. I suppose, ‘word photographs’ is not exactly what the blogs are…they are much more. They require me to express, in the written word, things I find meaningful.

Each blog is a snapshot of something in life that has caught my attention in some way…something that has touched me.  I am sometimes surprised there seems to be so much, and I am equally surprised at the rather consistent emerging patterns that interest me. 

The patterns became a little more evident, because of the unrelenting enthusiasm of the leader of a writer’s workshop I attend.  Last year, she encouraged me to put some of these blogs into a book, leading to life in small bites – moments in time, a group of 50 or so blogs. Compiling blogs into a manuscript required opening the scrapbook and looking at the verbal photographs that had been stored there.

It was the first time I had reviewed what I had been writing for four years or so.

I am just in the process of finishing a second book, including more of the pieces from the past few years. This, once again, required re-reading blogs in my ‘written scrapbook.’

As it turns out, this process of compiling some of the writings has proved to be instructive and insightful for me. Reviewing these pieces has provided me a deeper insight into the meaning of my life…the kinds of things I seem to consistently write about, have brought about a “…better focus…” and revealed something about my “…philosophy of life…”

While I have had a most amazing professional journey, I have written little about that, because, as it turns out it is the small things that touch me the most…it is the small things that make me feel alive and resonance with the living fabric of humanity - the incidentals that happen all the time in the cracks and crevices of life. They might be a shared moment with stranger on an airplane, a janitor at school, a friend’s child, or small talk with friends or neighbors.

I suppose there are big things to talk about…the places we have been…the chance meeting of a movie star or athlete in an elevator…the things we have seen and the places we have gone on holiday, but for me it is  ‘…life around the edges…’ that have given it meaning, and sitting with Leah in the “…darkened colorless shades of the early morning… bringing the Sonoran desert into a beautiful and richly colored living canvas.”

- ted