Surprised by Art

I started taking photographs with an honest-to-goodness Brownie box camera (Anyone else old enough to remember those?) that belonged to my parents when I was about 10 years old. Got some pretty good shots with it, too.

But I didn’t really take photography seriously until went back to college when I was in my thirties. I was required to take photography in order to earn my journalism degree. When I was introduced to the 35mm SLR Minolta, I fell in love.

I think part of the reason I love photography so much is because I’m such a control freak, and photography forces me to let go of some of that. Yes, you can control most of the results from studio photography, but the kind of photography I like is taking the camera on walks around the neighborhood, drives through town, vacations across the country or even across the ocean where you never know what you might see, what the lighting will be, or how fast your subject might be moving. It’s part art, part technical knowledge, and part treasure hunt. And sometimes it’s just dumb luck.

I remember seeing a wonderful photo of a fence line that glowed golden against a twilight sky and reading that the photographer had gone out to take a picture of the sunset. For some reason, she turned around and there behind her was the sun bouncing off the fence posts. Dumb luck.

One of my favorite shots of my own was even more dumb luck than that. In fact, it was a complete surprise. I didn’t even have a good camera with me—just a digital point-and-shoot I could stick in the pocket of my jacket. Hubby and I were on a tour of Yellowstone Park, and the guide had taken us to a river in a nearby town. I was standing on a bridge watching ducks and seagulls swimming below when one of the gulls took off. I panned, trying to get a shot of it in the air with its wings outspread, but the little dickens turned directly toward me. In panic, I tripped the shutter.

Later, when I checked the shots I’d gotten that day, I came thiiiis close to deleting it. Even on the small screen of the camera, I could see it was so blurred it was hardly recognizable as a bird. But something about the colors made me keep it.  

When I got home and put it up on my Mac I found this surprise:

To me, this photo has a beautiful abstract quality that I couldn’t have achieved if I’d been trying. Dumb luck.

If you’d like to see more of my photography, the rest of it much less surprising, check my foto blog at http://www.thrumyeyes-angelaparsonmyers.blogspot.com or click on the "thru my eyes" link on the left. I try to add a shot a day.

Nature or Nurture?

I’m sitting at the table trying to come up with a blog while Hubby is talking to me. He just informed me that girls like to play with dolls and cooking utensils. I said, “I never did.” He stammered around a little and finally said, “Well, you never really were with the program.”

My mother tried her best to get me to like dolls. “Santa” brought me a new one every Christmas, and my mother made cute little outfits for them. None of it worked. My father, on the other hand, bought a set of encyclopedia when I was two years old, my mother was pregnant with my sister, he was unemployed and they were living with my grandmother. First I looked at all the pictures, then as soon as I learned to read, I started with A and read through Z. Then I did it again when I understood more of the words.

Nature or nurture?

Both, obviously. If I hadn’t been interested, I’d have treated the encyclopedia like I treated the dolls—put them on a shelf somewhere and forgotten about them. But they were available, they demonstrated how important knowledge was to my father, and they just whetted my appetite for more reading, more learning. And that appetite has yet to be sated.

People seem to be almost like computers. We’re born with hardware. If the hardware we’re born with functions correctly, software is installed by way of learning and experiences. But just almost like computers. With people, the hardware can be changed by the software, so that learning and experiences cause new synapses and pathways to form in the brain. Children who have grown up playing video games have both software and hardware that is different from children who have not.

So we are a complex combination of nature and nurture. Add to that the wild card of human will that leads some people to follow completely unexpected paths, sometimes to achieve beyond all expectations, and predicting the exact path a child will follow becomes almost impossible.  

And when family, school and society all fail a child, all we can hope is for nature to trump nurture and give them the resilience to draw one of those wild cards somewhere along the way.  

The Dog Child

She seemed happy with her pack of dogs,

Like Mowgli with his wolves.

The tangled hair,

The ragged shirt

With that strange musky smell

Of unwashed child,

The green-hued snot

On upper lip

Seemed more marks of freedom

Than neglect.

Yet when a puppy disappeared,

Victim of an irate neighbor,

She was so accustomed

To adult-caused pain

That tears left silent tracks

Down dirt-smudged cheeks.

She and her family disappeared one night,

Left rent three months in arrears,

Unpaid water, lights, and gas,

And an angry D.C.F.S. agent

Trailing them across the state

With charges of abuse.

One by one the dogs

Allowed themselves to be picked up

And taken to the pound

To be destroyed.

            

Popularity and Basketball Stars

I don’t think I’ve ever been popular.  But if I had been, I wouldn’t have noticed it, because I walk around with my head in my own little world most of the time, thinking about the last book I read or plotting the next one I plan to write. I liked being a nondescript person in a nondescript world who lurks around the edges of the crowd and just observes everything that’s going on.

That worked well for me, and I spent many years doing it. Then I became a journalist who specialized in feature stories about ordinary people with extraordinary hobbies or experiences. My observations grew into a file box stuffed with stories that had been published in the Central Illinois newspaper where I worked. I had a brush with popularity as readers began to recognize my name. It was unnerving, and I didn’t really I like it.

But it helped qualify me for a job at a Fortune 500 corporation that allowed me to write stories about some extraordinary people with extraordinary jobs or experiences, but stay mostly anonymous. I was known only by my publications, so I could still lurk around the edge of the crowd and observe most of the time. This worked especially well when I was photographing events for my stories, because I was able to get great candid shots. And it was photographing one of those events that taught me a very important lesson about popularity.

I don’t remember where the actual division photographer was that day, but about mid-morning I got a nearly frantic call from the human resources manager. Karl Malone was a huge heavy equipment fan, and he was coming to visit the plant to see how it was made. The entire management team wanted pictures.

For those of you too young to remember Karl Malone or, like me, sports illiterate, he was the second-highest scorer in basketball after Michael Jordan, and held the record for the most free throws attempted and made. They called him “The Mailman” because he always delivered—for the Utah Jazz most of his career in the NBA.

So I walked into a visitors’ center packed with upper management frantic to be sure they had their photo taken with Karl Malone. They were milling around, jostling for position, introducing themselves and explaining their responsibilities in the corporation. So I just stood back and started taking candid shots.

Malone shook the hand of the division vice president and had starting greeting the department heads when he just stopped—and looked directly at me. He left the group of dignitaries and walked over to me, holding out his hand.

Now, if you’ve never stood next to a professional basketball player, you cannot imagine how impressive one can be. Granted, I am barely over five feet tall and accustomed to dancing with my head on the chest of my partner instead of cheek-to-cheek.  But if I had danced with Karl Malone, my face would have barely reached his diaphragm—which appeared to be rock hard under his golf shirt. The breadth of his shoulders was at least half my height, and his biceps could have been as big around as my thighs. I had to reach waaaaaaay up to shake his hand, and mine disappeared into his. No wonder those guys can pick up a basketball in one paw. He asked my name and what my job was, and surprisingly, I remembered. Then we lined up the management team like school children waiting for recess and snapped their photos one by one.

I followed Malone and his tour guide around the rest of the day, continuing to take photos for the division newspaper, and I saw him greet several others like he had me—leaving the group of  “important” men to approach two women who worked on the assembly line, stopping to speak to a welder, asking one of the test drivers to ride with him while he drove a piece of heavy equipment. Karl Malone was a popular man when he arrived because he was a rich and famous athlete. But by the time he left, he was popular for an entirely different and much better reason.

He was a class act.

Prairie Waves

Are touched by alchemists in autumn-

First the wheat, then the beans and corn.

And when all the earth is golden pale,

And the moon rises golden bright,

Farmers, like Neptune riding his sea serpent,

Drive combines through misty fields.

They swallow up the golden waves

And spew streams of gold into waiting vessels

Named International Harvester, Massey Ferguson,

Or John Deere.

Not So Safe a Haven

       Birth of a Vampire

A quiet sound awakens me—

It comes, and then is lost again,

Wrapped in the soft folds of the night,

Moved away by the silent wind.

I rise and push aside the drape

To try to see what I cannot hear.

A shadow flickers through the trees,

A silhouette both dark and sere.

It hesitates and turns to peer

At my frozen form behind the cloth,

And slowly, softly stalks me there,

With kitten teeth and bloody mouth.

Lying down, I know I’ve died,

To rise again to night and wood.

And now I know the quiet sound—

It was the drip of my soul’s blood.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

Meditation Location--For Clarity

Meditation is mediocre in Illinois,

Where all is green

And green is all.

The lushness of the summer garden

Diffuses thought,

Defuses action.

The hopeful holy must choose an exile

To find the profit

Of being a prophet.

Sometimes the soul requires a desert

For concentration

Of contemplation.

Balance—Or the Lack Thereof

I pulled the car next to the curb, turned off the engine, and said, “Home safely again.”

My daughter, grandkids and I had spent the weekend at Anime Central, a convention of anime and manga fans held each spring in Rosemont, near Chicago O’Hare. When I’d pulled out of the parking garage, Harry Plotter, my GPS, decided to take us home via the most direct route—right through the heart of Chicago. Getting out of that traffic in one piece was major. Plus, I’d had to use the bathroom for the last 30 miles or so.

But I spoke too soon.

Leading up to the door of my daughter’s house are three concrete steps. Hauling a suitcase with one hand and carrying a tote in the other, I negotiated the first step and made it up the second.

Then, when I lifted my foot to step onto the porch, my toe caught. I remember realizing I was about to land on my knees, which had been a bit tender ever since they were replaced, and thinking, “This is gonna hurt. And I’ll probably pass out and wet my pants.”

And in my concern over messing up those marvels of modern medicine, not to mention my underwear, I was able to prevent them from hitting the concrete. Unfortunately, in doing so, I further lost my balance and pitched forward headfirst into the doorframe with the full force of my ample weight.

I sat back, thinking, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. Wonder if I dented the aluminum?” Surprisingly, no pain. And I still needed to pee. Which, under the circumstances, was a good thing.

But I remembered being told never to allow anyone who had suffered a head injury to get up and try to walk. Several scenarios ran through my damaged head. In one, my daughter tried to carry me into the bathroom and threw out her back.  No, that wouldn’t do. She had to work Monday. In another, she called 911 and told the paramedics I didn’t need to go to the hospital, I just needed to go. No, that wouldn’t work either. And even if she’d had a bedpan handy, I wasn’t about to use it on the front porch.

So I crawled over the threshold, through the living room, down the hall, and into the bathroom, where I was thankful for the first time that the room was so small that my knees nearly touched the tub when I sat on the stool. Made it easy for me to use the tub to pull myself up off the floor.

After breathing a sigh of relief, I assessed the situation. I still had no pain or dizziness, so maybe I’d be OK if I got up.  Holding onto the sink just in case, I rose and looked at myself in the mirror.

Not good. Through my bangs, I could see a fine line on my forehead and continuing back into my hair. And it was about to drip blood. My daughter, who had followed me into the hall, grabbed a clean dishtowel and instructed me to hold it to my forehead while she made sure I got to the sofa safely. I sat a moment wondering what to do next. I was still nearly an hour from home, and although I felt fine, I knew I had no business trying to drive.

So I called Hubby and told him I’d tripped and hurt myself and didn’t think I should try to drive home. Would he please come up and get me? He said, “OK. Be there in about an hour.” No questions. None. You’d think he was used to my making strange requests.

My daughter, nurse that she is, kept checking to be sure I hadn’t suffered a concussion. I pulled the dishtowel away from my forehead and was surprised it hadn’t soaked through. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” I said when she wanted to examine my head more closely.

Then I felt something tickle the back of my neck and reached up to rub it. My hand came away covered with blood. No wonder the dishrag was relatively dry. My daughter now insisted on examining the wound. “I can’t tell how far back it goes because your hair is so thick,” she said. “But blood is running down the back of your head, and you’re going to need stitches.”

So by the time my husband arrived, we had determined I had two choices: 1. Go to the emergency room in the city where she lives., or 2. Bleed all over Hubby’s car for an hour and go to the emergency room in the city where I live.  The former seemed more logical.

I didn’t realize how bad it was until the emergency room nurse and the physician’s assistant started cutting away my blood-matted hair. The nurse, wide-eyed, said, “Oh my. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a head wound that big before.”

The doctor put six stitches in my forehead and used nineteen staples to close the split scalp in my hair. About 1 a.m., after an MRI to make sure my head had suffered no damage beyond the obvious, Hubby and I finally headed for home.

Over the next week, my eyes nearly swelled shut and my face turned several interesting shades of purple, green, and yellow. Needless to say, I didn’t go out much. Then I wore hats for about another week until I was able to get all the blood and antibiotic out of my hair. Now I have kind of a Harry Potterish scar on my forehead and a looong natural part.

And oddly, it never did hurt. Which gives Hubby way too much ammunition when he tells me I’m being hard headed.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011