Photographing Stonehenge

I'm thinking about buying a new camera, one of those point-and-shoots, easy to carry, and with creative choices that my iPhone doesn't offer. My old, heavy SLR is a throw-back to an era of burdensome, conspicuous ownership that no longer entices me.

I just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey without a camera of any kind. I went with the notion that putting a camera between myself and my surroundings would interrupt my experience. I like the naked eye, a preference I first discovered many years ago, after I spent a summer semester in England and had taken a side trip to Stonehenge. Back then I carried another big bulky camera, which hung from my neck like the ancient mariner's albatross.  A telephoto lens counter weighed my backpack. My expensive gear was borrowed, and I bore it with pride.

I took the Stonehenge trip in a heavy rain, hitchhiking with a friend. It stopped before we got to the monoliths, which were made even more picturesque by the mist that surrounded them. As I lumbered with my load through the crowd of tourists, I overheard one say that a week-long pagan ritual had just ended the day before.

There were stanchions that kept the crowds away from the stones. I asked if they had been removed for the ceremonies and was told yes. This piqued my imagination. I thought about the ones in the inner circle who were entrusted with touch and proximity. They were distinct from the rest of us who knew these stones were special only because we had been told. I think now that I used my camera as a shield, its brand (a Nikon, I think) the crest with which I could proclaim not who I was, but who I wanted to be.

I imagined the first group giving back as well as taking from the site. What they gave I wasn't sure. That site of worship had its mysteries and energetic exchanges that I couldn't understand. I belonged to the second group, or maybe that isn't the right word, since we consisted of everyone who didn't belong to the first group. We were less a group than a temporary collection of "others" who had amassed at Stonehenge out of curiosity and cultural longing, with our different beliefs and backgrounds. We would soon disperse and go back where we came from, and that would be that.

Except for our pictures. They were our link. We would all have our pictures when we got home. Along with the others, I held my camera between the stones and myself and clicked away, focusing on light adjustments and shutter speeds, keeping the faith that one or two photos would ultimately please. Someone pointed out that twin rainbows were emerging, which got me to look up. But only for an instant. I didn't want to miss the photo opportunity and quickly knelt on my knees to steady myself as I tried to encompass the stones and the sky with its double rainbow in my limited frame.

Once my roll of film was filled with these rainbow-covered pictures, I felt that my trip was complete. I might not be one of the inner-circle, but I had caught an extraordinary scene. (I didn't stop to think about rainy England with its high rainbow probabilities.) I believed I was moving towards the inside of another group--sophisticated travelers--better than ordinary tourists, although I couldn't have said how.

I'm glad I felt that sense of satisfaction that day because none of those pictures turned out. Back home in the fall, I searched through shot after shot of haze and blackness. Of all of my photographs from that summer, Stonehenge was the only spot that didn't take. Shots of London, the lake district, Westminster, Scotland, Ireland all shined brightly on glossy contact sheets. Only Stonehenge refused to be captured. It was then that I began to think there might be something to the energy in some places in the world. And it was then that I began to distrust photography for its promise of post-gratification.

But that was a long time ago. Now I begin to want the simple fun of cropping a beautiful figure or scene, a garden gate, an open door, a road. So many sensations have passed through me, some remembered, some not. I once again want to relate in another way, giving my love of this life to the things of life itself. Not to try to capture what can never be caught, but to say this is how I saw it that instant and then I moved on.

Passport

Preparing for the trip I just took to Greece and Turkey reminded me that I'll need to renew my passport in a couple of years.  The last time I did that was in 2006, soon after my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I don't remember a thing about that last renewal. We had no plans for any trips abroad. Our routes were etched between home and hospital, home and doctors' offices. My solo journeys were from home to work and back again.

I had abandoned my own concerns to concentrate on those of my family. Besides Al's illness, I was in charge, long-distance, of my mother's care. It surprises me to think I even noticed that my passport was about to expire. I always kept it in the same place--in the top right-hand drawer of my desk. That's where I keep the things I need to grab quickly. A stapler and remover, scissors, stamps, envelopes. Somehow my passport fits there, even though I've never grabbed it, thrown some things into a carry-on, and hopped a flight to some exotic place at the last minute.

That's the thing about a passport. It holds a place in the imagination for fantasy. It promises the simple pursuits of curiosity and enthusiasm. A safe passage and a safe return. In a word, hope.

Did I have hope then? I lived with my fingers crossed, not quite the same thing. I didn't expect much for my mother. Her dementia was claiming her, little by little. It was too strong for her to fight. But Al was a gifted fighter. Through his intellect and physical strength, I hoped against hope that he would win.

Maybe he reminded me to renew my passport. That seems likely. Before he got too ill, he looked out for me while I looked out for him.

My picture startles me when I open the cover. There is no vanity, no smile. My mouth is open, as if I am gasping. As if I had paused for an instant while running a race. I stare straight ahead, but not at the camera or whoever was behind it. I am staring at nothing or nothingness. It was not good back then for me to pause. I needed to keep moving.

I didn't use that passport for several years. It stayed in my desk drawer until 2009. Since then I've carried it to Israel, France, Ecuador, Turkey, and Greece. It's only when I open its navy blue cover that I see who and what I once had no time to consider.

Every now and then, it isn't a bad thing to come face to face with the wounds that we believe have receded into the past. It reminds us of our strength under pressure and our ability to endure. It helps us appreciate the good in our present. And it gives us the opportunity to cherish our loved ones who have passed.

In a year or so, it will be time to take a new picture to stick on my renewal. So it goes. The story of a life.

Emergency Room Redux

A nasty dog bite sent me to the emergency room on Memorial Day. The first time I went to an emergency room, I was three years old and had blacked out after I'd tried an experiment involving an electrical outlet and a hairpin. What I remember from that trip was my surprise at seeing grown-up strangers wearing pajamas in the public waiting room. All that intimacy among strangers.They seemed to lack the purpose and drive I was used to seeing in adults. Yet, they weren't relaxing, the way my father did when he'd come home from work. They seemed more like me, a child, waiting to be called by whoever was running the place. I wondered, had they done something wrong too?

By the time my husband died seven years ago, I'd become quite familiar with ERs, each one seeming like a clone of the one I knew best at Sloan Kettering. They were all set up similarly. It didn't matter if we were in Pittsfield or Great Barrington or Manhattan, I knew by then what to expect from the many days and nights we had waited in one or another of those rooms. I'd learned to carry a sweat shirt and socks for the frigid temperatures and to give the strangers who shared the room with us some psychic space and pretend privacy. In such close quarters, I'd learned to focus on the television screen eternally blaring the "news," while ignoring the real news--people hurting and dying, new ones each time.

I'd learned to ask if there were any warm blankets for Al, and to offer to get one myself since the staff was too busy with paperwork and other patients. Since his heart hadn't stopped or his breath, or he wasn't bleeding, the wait could be very long. But I can't say that I learned patience. It was suspension that I practiced. Of thought. Of feeling. . . except hope. I never stopped hoping for one more save, until our last visit on his final weekend.

The overcrowded weekends still puzzle me. I can understand gunshot wounds and injuries from drunken brawls or accidents of children home from school, but why do so many people who are just minding their own business get so sick after 5:00 on Fridays until 8:00 Monday mornings? I realize that the answering services of off-duty doctors send them to ERs, but what I mean is why so many?

It's a child's question. The unanswerable why. I hear it from a distance, even though it comes from within. This place of crisis and angst stuns a part of me that apparently hasn't healed or moved on. The best I can do is isolate it and try to back away.

The mind is funny, isn't it, in its insistence on returning to the past. The trauma of the dog bite must have triggered my earlier memories, which remain so vividly real to me. I can't recall much about my recent visit to the emergency room in Hudson. It was practically a non-event. I do remember that I couldn't stop shaking, although it wasn't overly cold in there. My treatment was some minor cleaning, bandaging, and medication. My wait was short and my stay over quickly. Except for the scabs that are all that remain from the puncture wounds on my leg, no one would be able to tell it happened.

Red Geraniums

Every year, towards the end of May when the possibility of sudden frost has passed, I buy eight red geraniums to plant in my kitchen window boxes. It's a mindless excursion--just what I need to mark the end of a mentally draining school year. I chose my flowers by my senses. Like a hummingbird I let myself be drawn to the red of the moment. Some years it has a hint of orange. Some years blue.

But it's always red. When I moved into my house fifteen years ago, I was seduced by pinks and mauves, but unlike red, those colors don't hold the light. They don't draw my eye the second I turn the last bend of my driveway and glimpse home. They don't glow from a distance or blend into the weathered gray cedar siding. No consensus building here!

I want to be surprised by an opened bud when I l glance through my kitchen window. Bright and crisp, it has made it into this world where every element has to be just right to foster its growth. A cultivated flower in a root-bound setting, but you wouldn't know it to see it in all its stubborn radiance.

Color, life, growth--and all I have to do is add water.

The Place of In-Between

The newly-mowed grass, three days of rain, and a robin's nest in the crook of the birch tree outside my bedroom window all signal to my senses that I've moved into the new season of spring. The semester's over, but my brain hasn't stopped rehashing course work and final grades. At night my sleep in still troubled by self-interrogation. What went well? What needs adjusting for the next time I teach?

It will take some time to realize where I am--the in-between. I don't yet feel right in my spring season. I'm nervously anticipating the coming days when my self-discipline and sloth fight it out head to head. I'm wondering which will win out in summer 2014. And I'm still not free from my tightly-committed semester, when it seemed like every minute required being in two places at once.

Meditation would help, but right now nothing could convince me to sit still, contemplate my breath, and watch my thoughts arise only to let them go. I'm in no state to do that. . .yet. Like a racer who has just passed the finish line, my adrenaline is still pumping, fooling me into believing there are more laps to run.

It's taken me years of practice to even recognize this place of in-between, let alone attempt to dwell in it with some effort towards patience. It's stressful letting go of the known only to move into not knowing how things will turn out. I want to get it over with and move on to something tangible and nameable. Something other than the uncertain, out-of-focus present before my self-directed work begins. Or doesn't--it's up to me.

I tell myself that this state of in-between, as uncomfortable as it is, is where insights arise. I know this from experience. There I am buried under the oblivion of doubt and regrets, when suddenly I see a new, clear perspective that's just right for the present moment. Maybe I even need the distraction of chaotic feeling to let the shift happen. Each time it's a revelation to me that my mind has been active behind the scene, puzzling and creating new paradigms.

Just now for a more pleasant distraction while the gears turn in the background, I'm heading out into this breezy spring morning to the farmer's market to buy red geraniums.

On Turning Sixty-Five

Maybe it was the card I got from the government that got me to start telling my age again. I had taken a five-year hiatus from blurting it out, starting when I turned sixty. Before then I'd had no trouble, even been proud to declare I was forty and fifty and fifty-five. But sixty bested me. I found myself smiling and keeping mum when the opportunity arose for me to reveal my age in any conversation.

Without forethought or intention I went into a closet, where I hid an essential part of myself. What some might call discretion--no big deal--felt to me like a lie. I was no age or any age, but I was not my actual age. I left it to others to guess, assuming (hoping) that they would guess I was younger.

I tried to rationalize that a person's age should have nothing to do with shame or pride. Shouldn't those feelings be a result of our actions? But I realized that those "shoulds" meant that my argument had a weak foundation. I needed to focus on what "is" and not what "should be." Just like any other closeted person, I felt ashamed of myself for being, well, for being myself. In this case that meant being over sixty or just plain old.

You'd think I'd have known better. After all, I understood first-hand the alternative to getting old. In a previous five-year span, I'd lived through the deaths of my husband, mother, and father.  But what had been upper-most in my mind then--that life is precious and too, too brief--got buried under the cultural stereotypes of aging.

Despite such exemplary models of aging as Susan Sarandon, who seems immune to type-casting, and Jane Fonda, who exposes her own conflicts for the edification of us all, I let myself be swayed by the voice of television. I had used tv as an escape from the loneliness of bereavement, perceiving it as "white noise." But its constant and consistent message had gotten to me. Whether as "news," drama, talk, or advertisement, it calls anyone over sixty old, elderly, a senior citizen. It sells potions and creams for fine lines and signs of aging to thirty-year-olds, played by twenty-year-old actors. (Notice it's "signs of aging." They don't use the word "wrinkles" any more. The mere mention of "aging" is enough for us to react in fear and reach for our wallets.)

I bought what it was selling and paid for it with my hard-won knowledge. But I'm reclaiming it now. However I look to others, I'm sixty-five years old. Sometimes I feel just that age, and I like it because I have glimpses into what life is about for me. Sometimes I feel much older than my years with my intimate knowledge of cancer and dementia, care taking and the deaths of those closest to me. Sometimes I feel very young with much still to learn about life's mysteries and my own path.

Whatever it was that snapped me out of my cultural enchantment (that Medicare card?), I'm glad to be awake and struggling to be authentic. I suppose that struggle is a funny thing to be happy about, but it means that I'm alive, evolving, and looking forward to the next challenge.

The Best We Could Do

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

W. H. Auden

Last week my college sponsored a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. It took place in the students' cafeteria, and the first part was the reading of the names of the dead. They were children mostly, no older than 17, many much younger. The participants were instructed to read the names slowly and not to worry about mispronunciations. The eastern European names with all those consonants butting up against one another tends to trip up an American tongue.

Each volunteer read from the list for fifteen minutes. I was the last to read, arriving after my morning class. The crowded cafeteria was buzzing with the students' conversations. It took me a minute to locate the speaker at the very back of the room. She was standing behind a podium with the microphone turned down low, so as not to interfere with the studying, texting, and talking of the students.

I sat down at a table besides the podium and strained to listen to her reading of the names and ages of the kids killed in the Holocaust. As I listened I watched the kids in the cafeteria. Most were utterly absorbed in their own business. It was, after all, the week after spring break and close to the end of the semester. The pressure on them was intense. They had projects to finish and finals to take. They had summer jobs to find and, for some, graduation and its afterlife loomed. Their minds were in the future, not the past.

A few students who sat near the podium looked up occasionally from their iPhones to watch the speaker for a quick moment before diving back into their personal screens. I wondered why they had chosen those seats. They may not have had a choice and had to take the only seats left in the cafeteria, the ones that the kids who got there first had avoided.

When my turn came to read, I stepped behind the podium and considered the final few pages. All of the family names began with W. There were groupings of siblings or relatives who had shared the same last name. The speaker before me had read the age of each victim as a number, and I wondered if the kids in the cafeteria understood that these were children who had been executed. I had decided that when my turn came to read, I would say ¨five years old¨ instead of just ¨five¨ or whatever the age for each child, but somehow when I spoke I didn't deviate from the previous format. I was frustrated with myself for locking into a mode that had already failed to wake up this potential audience.

Or maybe some of them were awake and thinking of other genocides that had no acknowledgement or memorial service. Other genocides. Multiple genocides. Their innocent dead. That's enough to put anyone back to sleep or make them want to escape into the tasks at hand.

I stumbled many times as I spoke the names. My speech sounded too quick and monotonous to my ear. Those names should have been sung or chanted. Or echoed. Or cried. But I did none of those things.

In years past the ceremony was held in the school auditorium. It may have been moved because of a conflicting event, but more likely the reason was low attendance or no attendance. I myself have skipped it in the past because I was too busy, too tired, or not in the mood. On this day, in fact, I felt somewhat self-congratulatory for participating. I tried to kick away that feeling to make room for something more comfortable--solemnity or sanctity--but that was too much. I had to make do with just showing up, standing, and speaking to an indifferent crowd.

On this day passive reception had to suffice for us all. I, with my contradictory thoughts and conflicting feelings. The students, with their overwhelming projects and fears for the future. All of us consciously or not, absorbed some essence of those children, aged one and four and seven--all the way to seventeen. Their names washed over us. Maybe for a brief time they connected us. It was the best we could do.