when I was in high school I wanted to be a photographer and my favorite class (next to anatomy and physiology) was photography. actually, what I wanted to be was a photojournalist so that I could document the cracks and crevices of life that I thought (ah the angst) nobody else noticed. I wrote poetry and despised being told that it was nice. I did not want to be nice or nice's little sister, or even her slightly goofy cousin. I wanted to be deep. Deep was an orphan, a loner by choice. she walked the woods and rode her bike downtown to the library and wasn't afraid of the bums who hung out where she parked her bike. Deep thought long thoughts and wore vintage clothes in a way that inspired regret in Miss Casual Corner and her best friend Miss Full Price and something, not jealousy, not even envy; maybe admiration and the unforeseen spin-off toward desire. but there was no club for deep, no warm enclave of fellow deepsters who would hang out in the parking lot by their family sedans, maybe smoking cigarettes. Deep was not about cigarettes or hanging out: deep was not that self-absorbed.
our first assignment was texture. we were told to take one of the class cameras (I had saved my summer earnings as a lifeguard and bought a Minolta SRT 201 because I was that serious) and take pictures of anything that represented texture. I remember the smell of the darkroom chemicals, winding the exposed roll and feeling anxious that I had ripped the film as it unwound jerkily from the spool, the flash of excitement as my photos awakened against the dim later. there were the photos of tree bark and somebody had thought to take very close angles of concrete, also variations on fabric. pet fur. my old man floated in the tray, a face full of lines and creases riding a look of deep content. he was an older black gentleman and he was dressed in what would have been called back then his Sunday best. his shiny knobbed hands rested on top of his cane, he had a brown wool bowler hat, and he was sitting on a bench in the quaint downtown of Winter Park. The preppsters from Rollins College were popping into the East India Company for iced teas and palmiers and the store whose name I have forgotten that sold Deans of Scotland shetland sweaters and button downs. When I was growing up if you were rich and lived far away from either side of the tracks you lived in Winter Park and went to Winter Park High and had lunch with your mother at the restaurant with the Tiffany glass windows. Winter Park was very clubby, very east coast and old money and ivy on brick. I was not rich, and we lived in a neighborhood that was once an orange grove.
it had not occurred to me to ask him who he was or to ask him where he lived or his story, or anything about him. the assignment was texture. later in my phase of the old folks period when I wrote endlessly, tirelessly about old men in rocking chairs and hints of death, never a close up of it since death was not something I knew, I skated the surface in the same safety zone neither below nor above it, held by things I had not yet seen.
