Snapshots: One

Photographers suffer from something I call febrile frustration. You’re passing by in a car and you see a perfect scene you frame and capture in your mind’s eye. You can’t stop to capture it–it was too fleeting anyway. A grouping of people with gestures and expressions that says something profound in that moment. Light striking just so in the wind. A man in a long coat passing by a building with such a wonderful play of lines and angles. Or perhaps you’re sitting on a wall of a fountain somewhere in a European town and the way people are leaning in together at the cafe across the way would make a shot that spoke volumes. But pointing a camera would be an unforgivable intrusion. Writing, on the other hand, requires only deep concentration on the memory of that moment, recapturing that which was embedded, at least temporarily, in that keen eye of the mind. You just have to look into the unbounded space within.


One

Walking down the sidewalk on a Sunday morning-three small children cavorting in a little group, waving new, brightly colored whirligigs, prancing a bit, laughing as they turn towards each other, faces bright, joyful, all in puffy coats and fuzzy, variously colored hats against the damp chill of the weather and the grey of the sky. And a woman, evidently the mother, bundled up, walking alongside them on the wide patches, eyes looking forward but inward, serious, a bit of a wrinkle forming at her temples and between her brows. She must have taken the kids along to the cheaper grocery store down the road before it closes at noon since she carries a heavy shopping bag in her right hand. She has, as mothers do, bought the children something to delight them and entice them to accompany her on an errand they would otherwise resist. She has, in doing this, protected them against the boredom and worries of the world she inhabits, not only in body, but constantly in mind. She can still divert them from what she clearly cannot avoid. It is as heavy as the package she must transfer from time to time to the other hand. The children, as close as they stay by her side, clearly still inhabit a different universe. She knows she must somehow will that to continue.