'Scuse me while I kiss the sky by john
Via Flickr:
No filters, no PS; as shot, straight from the scanner except for some sharpening. Nothing against PS...it was just a magic 10 minutes of glowing purple light. B l a c k M a g i c large on black large on black Table Mountain Preserve, southern Sierra foothills. Cool plateau that's all basalt lava; the tabletops are the ancient bed of the San Joaquin River. 10 million years ago an eruption filled the river with lava, which cooled and solidified over time. After the uplift that created the Sierra Nevada, softer rocks surrounding the lava eroded away, leaving a ribbon of basalt that can be seen for miles in all directions. The lava also holds water in vernal pools, so the place has more wildflowers than anywhere else around, far into the middle of summer. *Also...see crop below, thanks to suggestion from saliv8
Lauren and Greta | New Haven, Connecticut | August 2016
I’ve known Lauren for a pretty long time now; I adore her completely.
As is the case with many of the people I call friend at this phase of my life, she’s not someone I have known the longest or someone with whom I keep in the closest of contact, but of course, that doesn’t matter.
I’ve moved around so much since I was born that cultivating lifelong friendships from an early age was a near impossibility. And while I’ve always been immensely envious of people who have just lived in one spot their entire lives until say college or just after, I have to be thankful that one of the primary perks of being in a military family always on the go is you get the chance to form new relationships in new places.
To be honest, I have kept in very loose contact with someone I’ve known since kindergarten, but he lives in the very distant location (so distant it might as well be another planet) of Hong Kong. But as it turns out, it wasn’t just the friendships I made in my teens that proved to be the most important and enduring.
After college, I moved from Columbia, South Carolina -- a place I really regard as my first chosen home -- to Boston purely on a whim. I had no plan; I had just a little bit of money saved. I had the vaguest idea of making it as a writer while working as a temp or doing something that paid the bills. I was twenty-three, but I wasn’t one of those twenty-three year-olds with a masterful resume and a million internships and tons of experience in really anything. I liked punk rock, and by the time I graduated college I had worked in an after-school program, a record store and a book store. I’d had no real internships or really the foggiest clue of what I wanted. I could probably still make that case somehow, but at least I’ve got some kind of experience these days. But back then, in early 2001, I still wasn’t a fully-formed human. I was still figuring myself out in a major major way. The only real experience I had post-college was a year of working as a “news assistant” (still not entirely sure what that means) at The State Newspaper in Columbia, and I had a few writing samples under my belt. I believe that job paid the whopping salary of $19K, a sum that at the time sounded thrilling in its bigness.
The idea of Boston was to meet back up with my closest friend, who was then a master’s Lit student at Boston College, and yet again get acquainted with someplace new. Making friends wasn’t hard as most of the people I came across were all linked to the city’s punk and hardcore scene, and that gave me an instant gang of like-minded folks for socializing and show going.
Yet I like to tell people that Boston beat me up in ways that New York never did, and that’s largely because I moved to a city knowing almost no one, without family around and I was fighting to get essentially any job I could find. It was bleak for awhile (very very lean), that is, until a temp agency serving Harvard found a random office for me to pretend I had any kind of office skills. I didn’t have any office skills, but I managed to not get fired. In the afternoons and evenings, I plugged away writing music reviews and interviews and feature pieces for any publication that would have me. It was mostly for free, to build up a byline, but the experience eventually got me freelancing for the Boston Globe and the Phoenix (RIP), however sporadically.
I met Lauren around 2003, when we were both working very tenuously and casually at something called AOL Digital City (which, as it turned out, was not the last time I would work for AOL) as “editors,” which basically meant we edited freelance copy of restaurant and entertainment reviews for different city sites and then we listened to a lot of music and goofed off. It was a great job, and it paid pretty well. One of the main benefits of those freelance gigs was they enabled me to parlay all of that into some kind of full-time writing/editing gig, and looking back on it I had it really good even if I was still essentially just getting by. The job wasn’t hard-nosed reporting, but it was writing, and I was immensely proud to have it until I was unceremoniously laid off when the office just up and closed one day. Ahh, the Internet giveth and the Internet taketh.
Lauren and I became not quite fast friends, but coworkers who ribbed each other over music and food and basically anything. We just had that kind of relationship, pranking and riffing on each other constantly. All that eventually evolved into a friendship that is more important to me now than I think it ever was when we were living in the same city and had an abundance of free time to drink a ton of coffee, eat burritos in Davis Square or go see shows at the Middle East or the Paradise. We still rib each other, but mostly I just like to watch her be an incredibly stand-up mom. True, she’s still got the razor sharp sense of humor, but mostly she’s just a really good person.
So, after we both made our lives in the New York area in the mid aughts -- her to Brooklyn and me to Jersey City -- she, her husband and baby decamped to New Haven almost two years ago. They had both given New York many many years of their time, and as happens, they wanted kids and thus space. We all know this story, and it’s one with which I grapple constantly.
Lauren’s had a new baby in the interim, and they bought a house and her life is really something wonderful these days. I’m in awe of my friends who seem to be able to balance being the person I have always known coupled with taking care of this new little person they’ve created. She’s an excellent mom, and I can’t wait to see her kids grow.
There’s so much more I can and will write about my friendship with Lauren. I may even tell a story about chasing a fading rock singer through a Cambridge mall with little more than a marker and pack of gum or the times we had in her old apartment in Brookline, but not now. It’s getting late, and it’s my bedtime.
Ryan and I did get to spend some time with Lauren and her family last weekend as we headed up to ole Boston for, what else, a baby shower. I managed to take a few pictures of them at their lovely new home. It was a good, soul satisfying time.
All pics are with the Nikon N6006 and Portra 400 film.
