Blog Archives
Parking (lots)
The first time I stopped in this town, a man pulled up in a truck and asked if he could “hep” me. He said, “She* seen you turn around at the gate** and we was wonderin’ if you needed some hep.”
I assumed that “hep” was a local word for “murder” so in a classic move, I tried some misdirection: I asked him where the cemetery was (“Own it, murderer!” was what I said to myself.) He told me it was down yonder, just past the silver*** house and I made a quick escape.
And then: I WENT BACK to that place. I didn’t see my friend from before, and to honest, I sort of missed him – I reckoned that I could add to my narrative.
Guess I’ll have to go back. Or is that too much fate-tempting?
Foss, Oklahoma
photographed 11.27.2021
*I don’t know who “she” was/is.
**I also don’t think I turned around at the gate?
***By “silver” he meant gray. Gray siding.
Jug-a-Lug
I stopped because of the Jug-a-Lug sign. But I made the image because of the state of that building with the boarded over windows and the (probably ineffective) patches.
So my Very Important Lesson For The Day© is that sometimes the thing you think you need to photograph is actually the thing that leads you to the thing you need to photograph.
Weatherford, Oklahoma
photographed 11.27.2021
Security Dog
You know how sometimes you go to an unfamiliar town and it feels comfortable and happy and friendly and you say to yourself, “I think I could live in a place like this!” and then you spend a happy few minutes imagining your new life in this magical place?
This was not that kind of town.
Bridgeport, Oklahoma
photographed 11.27.2021
168 empty chairs
Calm and peace and innocence were shattered at 9:02 am on April 19, 1995. It was a Wednesday. Employees, and children who attended the on-site daycare center, inside the Alfred Murrah Federal Building were surely busy doing their Wednesday things, right up until the moment an explosive-filled truck exploded just outside the building.
One hundred sixty eight people were killed; 19 of them were children at the daycare center.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial is on the site of the attack, and the Field of Chairs commemorates those lost that day. The chair here, in the foreground, represents Carol Louise Bowers; she was 55 years old and was on operations supervisor at the Social Security Administration. Accounts state that she would always answer the phone with “a happy voice” and her relative recounted that she was the “kind of person who …spread joy everywhere she went.”
(I would encourage you to go to the Field of Empty Chairs page to learn more about Carol and to see the layout of the chairs in this thoughtful and well-designed memorial.)
Oklahoma City National Memorial
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
photographed 11.25.2021
Hopper
This trip – a journey, really – that I went on in October was nearly 1,700 miles of driving and very nearly (it felt like) that many u-turns. This is but one example of something that caught my attention, but that didn’t catch it in time to just turn off the road like a normal person. (Doing anything “like a normal person” is not something I generally do anyway.)
Chandler, Oklahoma
photographed 10.11.2021
One Day | One Image 