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For lease
Of course, in addition to taking pictures along 6th Street on Sunday morning, another good time to visit would be any time the sun’s still up. The place doesn’t really get started until way past dark.
If your fondest desire has been to run a bar in Austin, you might want to check this place out.
East 6th Street
Austin, Texas
photographed 12.21.12
Service entrance
Thank you, Low Sun Angle, for illuminating the service entrance to Buffalo Billiards.
While I took this, a very large man stopped next to me, took a hit from his asthma inhaler and looked around to figure out what exactly it was that I could be interested in photographing. Unable to solve the mystery, he hitched up his pants, and headed on up the street toward Congress Avenue.
I thought you’d like that little detail.
along 5th Street, between San Jacinto and Brazos Streets
Austin, Texas
photographed 12.21.12
Thank you, Laurie
Lavendar, in Laurie’s kitchen
Maybe you’ve noticed, down in the comments section of the blog, that every day in 2012 there was a haiku?
My dear friend Laurie Jameson wrote those for me. It was her idea, and she committed to writing a haiku every day in 2012. Her words give a different insight into the image and I have enjoyed seeing the pictures again through her eyes.
Laurie’s one-year term as the Poet in Residence here at One Day | One Image is over, and I wanted to thank her for everything that she’s done for the blog this year.
I also want to thank her for pivotal role she’s played in my development as an artist. I met Laurie in 1996 at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, through our mutual friend Andy Wilkinson. At the time, Laurie was working as a poet, documenting her life on a ranch in Colorado. We struck up a correspondence, using actual letters (which sounds quaint nowadays!) and this is what started to happen: I’d write her a letter about something I’d done, she’d write back and say “that was a good story – you should write a poem about it.” Then I’d say “you’re kidding – it was a story about a silver spoon I bought at a thrift store” and then she’d write a lovely poem about it.*
Eventually it started to dawn on me that I ought to be the one writing the poems and I started taking my first shaky steps as a writer. She was at my side the first time I read one of my poems in public, at a writing workshop a few years later in Elko, when I was so nervous I nearly forgot how to breathe. And, when I had a poem published in an actual book , she came with me to Denver for a reading at the Tattered Cover bookstore. (I was still nervous, but did remember to breathe!)
I know that my current interest in photography would not have happened without Laurie’s encouragement of my (hidden) artistic side. She helped me learn how to identify that itchy feeling that means something creative is about to happen, and she encouraged me not to ignore it. I’ve realized that I am lot more content with myself when I am being creative, even if the creativity itself seems very hard.
So, thanks to Laurie for everything she’s done for me. Please stop by her website to see what she’s doing now. Drop her a line, too, if you want, and tell her I sent you.
And, for those of you who follow The Poetry of Photography, it’ll stick around for a while longer. Back in the spring, I gave the images and poems their own blog, The Poetry of Photography, where they got equal billing. If you haven’t found this blog already, head on over there – I will keep updating it every couple of days until I’ve run out of haiku
* Actual example.
Night
It was almost too much, walking around East 6th Street and the adjoining neighborhood, in Austin. Every place I looked I saw something that I wanted to photograph: walls, signs, bad paint jobs, worn brick, and on and on.
Since 6th Street is known for its nightlife, the best time for someone like me to visit is early Sunday morning, when there are no pesky people to get in the way of a good shot.
I spotted this gem on the way back from the weekly gospel brunch at Stubbs BBQ.
along Red River Street
Austin, Texas
photographed 11.23.12
December 31
Chester Green and Ada Ruth Martin, 1948
One: Song
Who knows what could strike before we meet again?
But if I fall down and die
Without saying goodbye
I give you this: you’ll have lost a friend.Bruce Cockburn – “Birmingham Shadows”
Two: 2005
Sometime in the early morning hours of the day that would be New Year’s Eve, I woke up from a dream that had already vanished, except for the memory of two words: crash cart.
I rolled over and went back to sleep.
Three: Normal
The normal part of that Saturday morning lasted until 8:37. Until the phone rang. It was my dad. My mom had fallen. She’d hit her head. He needed me right away. I arrived at his house just as the ambulance pulled away. We followed, and as we turned the second corner he said, “I thought she was dead.”
And by noon, she was.
Four: Not Normal
At the hospital the only thing she said was that the backboard hurt. While we waited for the CT scans, I washed dried blood from her hands and her right elbow.
I was trying to convince myself that things weren’t as bad as they looked.
Five: New Normal
After the CT scans, she was moved to a trauma room, where the nurses worked swiftly, grimly and tried not to make eye contact with us.
The doctor started saying things like “no significant hope of recovery” and I slipped her wedding rings from her finger. Then I stepped into the restroom, the only private place I could find, and started making calls – my husband, my sister, the pastor. The plates of the earth were shifting, ever so slightly, but causing great earthquakes as I became the adult in charge.
My dad sat on a hard plastic chair, facing my mom; I knelt on the floor in front of him as he said “great fear of nursing homes” and finally “we have to let her go.”
Six: Tears
Family arrived, nurses withdrew, the chaplain appeared. As she slipped away from us, as softly as a whisper, we stood around her bed, holding her and each other. My father’s tears dropped to her dying face, the last rights of his love for her.
Seven: And it was over
I scanned the room, and my eyes fell on a red cabinet on the other side. The sign over it said: crash cart.
Eight: Ragged Grieving
Those first ragged months of grieving were harder than I could have believed. Almost anything would trigger a flood of memories, regrets, tears. The hardest ones were the ones that sneaked in and kicked me before I knew what was about to happen.
Bruce Cockburn’s song with the line “If I fall down and die without saying goodbye” reduced me to tears for the rest of the day.
I barely made it through my birthday dinner, because the thought of my bewildered father trying to shop for a gift was too much to think about.
Mother’s Day, as contrived as it is, was harder than I thought it would be.
Nine: Seven Years On
But gradually, we learned how to live around that hole she’d left in our lives – and it was a surprisingly large hole for such a small woman.
I still miss her more than I can say, but I was lucky enough to have the kind of mom I can still miss this much.
Ten: A Namesake
I hate it that she never got to meet her great-granddaughter; she would have loved Hannah Ruth, her sweet namesake.
***
Listen to “Birmingham Shadows” here.
