My writing class at Pompanuck Farm resumed today, two couldn’t make it. The class is special to me, a group of gifted people with a special chemistry. The class is a safe place, a place of encouragement and ideas. We have confronted some elemental issues in our lives there, learning to be authentic, to show feeling and emotion.
There is no homework in class, no forced assignments, the ideas come from the students, people write because they want to write, not because someone made them write. I got a heavy head cold during the day, I am kind of a wreck tonight, and am going to bed early. I hope to sleep it off.
Maria is adamant about my resting tomorrow, and I am not good at that, so we’ll see what happens. I am tired for sure.
But I am happy that the class is cranking up again for the Fall. We were supposed to meet for four weeks, that was about a year ago. Teaching has become a calling to me, like writing and photography.
I felt an almost mystical connection to Sam Grubb when I saw him carrying his camera and staring at my photos in the Round House Cafe, a few days after my portrait show opened there. I had this strange sensation that I was looking at an earlier version of me, when I was also 17 years old, and dreaming of writing and taking pictures.
I wrote but did not take pictures for decades, but I always ached to have a camera and envied people who did. Sam”s photos are on his Facebook page, Sam Shot photos, take a look, he knows what he is doing. In a sense, I felt I was in a Twilight Zone episode, crossing paths with myself in time.
Why would I feel this? How could this be? Perhaps because he is just starting out as a photographer, and so am I, I have always been a writer, and now I am a writer and a photographer. Perhaps he will be a writer also. Jamie made me acutely aware of time, we are at opposite ends of life in many ways, yet in others, we are in the same place.
I felt an instant kinship with him, we seemed a part of the same community.
I was having lunch in the Round House Cafe today and I saw a young man clutching a Nikon and looking carefully at each of my portraits hanging on the wall. I remember the moment, I felt as if I was looking at a version of myself many years ago, I could picture me holding something like that, close to my chest, I could see the way he was studying the portraits.
I introduced myself as the person who took the portraits, and he told me his name was Sam Grubb, he lived in a nearby town and was 17 years old. He loves taking portraits, he worked three jobs for more than a year to buy his Nikon, he took it with him everywhere. He showed me some of the nature photos he loves to take, they were colorful, interesting and very well composed.
We talked for awhile, and I invited him to the October Open House, he lit up at the idea of taking pictures that weekend. I saw myself so clearly in him, in a number of different ways, I felt as if I were looking in the mirror long ago, and at myself. I also wandered a bit, obsessing on things I loved and cared about and wanted to do.
I asked Sam if I could take his portrait, he said sure. And he knew how to pose, and how to sit and where the light was that I needed. We did a little ballet together for a few minutes, I felt I understood just what was in his head, the very special way the young look at the world, and how very different it is from the way the old look at the world.
Jamie is wide-open doesn’t yet know the struggles of photography in the modern world, where cell phone and video devices have upended the very idea of commercial and news photography, and he doesn’t need to know that yet. His excitement and enthusiasm are palpable, and I hope he comes to the Open House with his Nikon, and takes some more great photos.
We are on opposite sides of our lives, but yet we are also in the same place. I have the feeling he will chase his dreams. I had the feeling I was looking in a mirror, I wonder if he did also. The past and the present and the future, all clutching camera.
We have a sick sheep, Socks, perhaps our gentlest sheep, has come up limping badly on one leg, and lying down rather than go out to pasture. We have been giving her daily penicillin shots – might be an infection in the foot – and confined her in the barn stall for a few days. She is getting better it seems, she can stand on the leg now.
Today, my writing class resumes at Pompanuck Farm, I’m excited. Got a nasty head cold. My portrait show reception is tomorrow, Sunday, 2 to 4 at the Round House Cafe, 1 Washington Street, Cambridge, 12816. There’s a front page story in our regional newspaper about the show.
Flo is the queen of all she surveys, and lately, is to be found in the mornings lounging on one of our Adirondack chairs out in the back yard. She occupies many spaces, hunts in every corner, soaks up the sun wherever she is. A regal creature.
