Category: Happy

I don’t know why, but I’m always pleasantly shocked at how early the Iris show up each year, and so it was when I spotted this one in our gardens this week.

New York, Abingdon Square, May 10th, 4 pm

I love kids, not just because they’re beautiful, and not just because they’re guileless, but mostly because in talking to them or watching them even for a few moments you can actually see them learn about their new world – in real time. I think the experience is especially exciting because, unlike most of us most of the time, they really want to learn.

But on an unhappy note:
Unfortunately I’ve been terribly inhibited about photographing children ever since a day years ago when, in the moment of capturing an especially wonderfully happy image I’d found in a public park, I was verbally assaulted by a woman for daring to violate the privacy of a child with my camera. I don’t think I was out of line, but I imagine there are other arguments. Still, if I’m wrong, it would seem to make the world sadder for all of us.

This is a view of the magnificent ornamental plum tree on 11th Avenue, surviving in the midst of the Chelsea gallery geography, captured late this afternoon.

Barry

uptown no. 2 train, February 13

I’ve edited my gallery of images from our trip to Mexico City, adding captions to each image (other than those of the hotel).
I’m afraid the information on the archeological images is rather poor, but I took no notes. I was really recording only those pieces I found both beautiful as objects and suitable for recording with available light. Only now that I am at home do I feel that was insufficient.
If anyone can add to or correct my texts, please email me or comment.
A trip like this is humbling in many ways, not least for me in confirming my inability to properly record images of what I have seen and felt. I’m very shy about pushing my lens into other people’s worlds, and when I am travelling with others I can’t, or won’t, take the time I would really need even to record inanimate objects.
It was a beautiful trip amid beautiful people and places. Even colds [both of us] at the beginning and at the end couldn’t and won’t take that away.
Barry regularly posted descriptions of our activities while we were there, starting here. You can use the navigation links at the top to go on to the other posts.

We’re in Mexico City. It’s glorious!
While I don’t expect to be posting text while we are here [too distracted], I think I will be able to regularly put uncaptioned images in this gallery. Captions when we return, I think.

Diego Rivera, detail from mural in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City

We’ll both be away for about a week, on our first visit to Mexico City, so posting is likely to be interrupted. Sweet Pea will stay home in the apartment with his tall and handsome gentleman companion while we are gone.

[image from Inter-American Institute]

At rest with the flu, in a room at the top of an old farmhouse in the rural American Northeast [an excerpt from a short piece in the NYTimes]:

I was raised to believe that sleep is a sovereign remedy for everything but death itself, so I drift between waking and sleeping, visited mostly by one of the cats, who likes the third floor — a converted attic — as much as I do. I wake just long enough to see the snow falling, and to judge how sick I feel, before drifting off again. The pleasure of it — waking only long enough to know you’re dozing — confirms something one of Ishmael’s shipmates said in “Moby-Dick”: “Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep.”

This is for those, like myself, lucky enough to be able to share memories like his but also for those who can only enjoy such beauty through another’s account. This is one of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s gentle evocations of the place where man meets the rest of nature.

The British show Bush what they think of him

In contrast to the few dozen people who were in Baghdad’s Fardus Square [now called “Freedom Square”] earlier this year when Americans toppled Saddam Hussein’s statue, today’s event in Trafalgar Square was cheered by as many people who could fit into the area. That crowd still represented only a portion of the total of more than 100,000 or so demonstrators marching in the streets of London today. Curiously, almost all of them represented the disrespected American thug’s putative ally.
[image from Yahoo News, AP Photo/ John D. McHugh]