It’s hard to believe it is November already. Following are some photos taken in the last two weeks.
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Late October Photos
Tag: Creative Life
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Friday Photos
Some new colors this week. It’s garlic planting time and when Friday is over, I hope it will be in.
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Fall Photos
This week was all about the shift to autumn—putting up hot peppers, processing apples, and getting ready for winter. Add a high school class reunion on Sept. 25, and it’s already been a busy season. Here are some of the best recent shots.
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Reunion Conversations
The combination of a punk reaction to my influenza shot and massive intake of information at our high school class reunion led to Saturday being a challenging day. I made it through the fog and by 4:30 p.m., felt like doing stuff. In quick succession, I finished yesterday’s post, canned a batch of applesauce and apple juice, and worked on laundry I started in the morning. In retirement, that makes a busy day.
Our time together at our high school class reunion Thursday night was precious. I don’t want to let go of the conversations. There are only so many of the 8.2 billion people on this jumping green sphere with whom an individual shares a life’s experience. Grade school and high school mates are unique in that regard, in my stable culture, anyway. Through conversation I became aware of developing a tunnel vision of my own history by focusing on a subset of experiences to produce an autobiography. The reunion opened my eyes to a broader experience that exists, of who I was and who I have become.
When we dig ourselves into a tunnel of memory, it seems useful and important to find our way out into our broader experience. I believe the brain captures our experiences yet some of them get relegated to places where they don’t get our attention. Too, our way of seeing filters out parts of our experience so we remember only the filtered events. John Berger said what I am trying to say more directly in his book Ways of Seeing:
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. (Ways of Seeing, John Berger).
Our class reunion helped me be more aware of the surrounding world, one that is specifically relevant to me and my classmates.
In addition to memory, my writing focuses on journals, letters, photographs, and blog posts created over a period of fifty years. For every detail captured, there are multiple that exist elsewhere if I can summon them. Talking to people with shared experiences is one way to do that.
A five minute conversation listening to a classmate that worked for an insurance company for 40 years, or another who lived in California for a similar amount of time then returned to Iowa and married a classmate, are ways to do that. Reading an email about how one classmate recruited the widow of another to attend is the same. The easy familiarity of one with whom I played basketball in the grade school playground is another. Spending time with someone who was a neighbor to a close friend I lost in an auto accident shortly after graduation is another. All of these remind me of the broader, yet common world we inhabited, at least for a while. We now inhabit the present together, at least on Thursday night we did.
I don’t seek to wax nostalgic about my high school experiences. The recent conversations remind me of who I once was and help to become a better me in the present. It’s no wonder I don’t want to let go.
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Creativity From the Calumet
The jump I made in 1989, from working for a top truckload common carrier to working for the ninth largest corporation in the world, freed me to be more creative. I read my journals from that time in the Calumet region near Lake Michigan and find in them the kernel of all that I would become as a creative person.
I am thankful my creative self came up through a grueling career as a transportation and logistics manager. It grounded me in the unpleasant reality that is society in the post-Reagan era. In particular, the more than 10,000 interviews I had with job applicants in transition changed me in a way that would not have been possible without them. For creativity to have been forged in this kind of life gives it an edge.
This passage came from my life experiences in the Calumet.
The book written by Jack Kerouac has the same validity as his presence here. What do the creators of these texts have to say to me? What shall I say from this outpost of civilization?
What becomes significant in this studio is not the clutter in it, but the words and texts produced here and sent into the rest of society. Things take on significance to me, but it is more important that I begin sending things out. Messages in a bottle if you will. (Personal Journal, Merrillville, Indiana, Sept. 15, 1990).
Because of my high level of engagement at work, it was exceedingly difficult to “send things out.” Likewise, there were not many platforms for doing so. I survived on letters to a few friends, trips to visit them, and time in my writing space contemplating life in society. When I could, I spent time in the garage or at the word processor in the dining area being creative. I never gave up being creative and that led me to today.
When I read a book, I image the author as if they were sitting across the room. Sometimes that works and indeed what Jack Kerouac wrote in any of his books is not far removed from his life. When I read one of Robert Caro’s books I imagine him in his workspace in New York, turning every page. When I read John Irving’s writing about Iowa City, I remember the occasional times I saw him near the English-Philosophy Building or visited one of the places mentioned in his books. When I read William Carlos Williams today, I can’t help but be influenced by the time I spent in Iowa City with his publisher James Laughlin. Laughlin got teary-eyed when he spoke of his last meeting with Flossie Williams. I want my writing to be like that: one step or less removed from the reader.
I mentioned clutter and sometimes such clutter gathered from projects of mine, auctions, and the detritus of living a life found its way into what I produced. I’m not sure it was particularly good, yet it reflects my urge to create something new and original. A collage of photographs, old calendar pages, and magazine advertising was something I found visually appealing at the time. That I still have this piece is remarkable.
Leaving the trucking firm freed me from my Iowa connections and enabled new ones in the Calumet. I became more of a creative being. When things didn’t work out at my new job I returned to the trucking firm. Yet I did something after leaving that stays with me. I was able to better balance work, creative endeavor and family after the experience. There is a straight line from that realization to today.
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End of Summer
Just over a week until autumn begins so I am taking a break from bloggery to enjoy these last days. Thanks for following my posts.
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A Life of Photos – Part VII
How does a photographer capture well-known sites? I would argue professional photographers whose work appears on post cards serve a useful function in capturing a personal experience.
This photograph of Mount Rushmore was created in part by my being there. Composition of the resulting image is due largely to the design of the visitors center which presented a platform from which I took it. The light is good and the talus provides context. However, picking up a postcard at the gift shop eliminates variations inherent in converting a digital image to a print. If you stick to selecting familiar images, postcards can be interchangeable with printed photos in terms of remembering the experience. I submit having both types of image upgrades the experience.
The advent of the “bucket list” likely ended a lot of meaningful photography. If Mount Rushmore were on my bucket list, I might have stepped in front of the camera to record myself with the famous sculpture. Maybe at home I would have a bulletin board where I pinned all my bucket list photographs. People are free to do what they want, but for me, the memory of that moment’s experience is what stands out more than a trophy photograph hanging on a wall or uploaded to a website.
Defining who we are in the context of our lives, and who we want to be matters more than an arbitrary list of places we seek to visit. Above all, it is about the experience. A personal photograph or postcard is a subset of what that experience is. Photos are not necessarily the most important part of it.
What was this experience about? My friend since seventh grade and I left our spouses behind and made a long road trip out west. The furthest point was Missoula, Montana where we visited another high school friend and their spouse. Mount Rushmore was one of the less interesting stops we made. We were so close to it we felt obliged to stop, so we did. It was tacked on to an experience about something else.
I am a bit old school in that I don’t see much purpose to video recording a well-know site. My aunt, uncle, and their family lived in Europe for a number of years. They took home movies on 8 millimeter film when they traveled. I recall one where they visited the leaning tower of Pisa and recorded the kids trying to push it the rest of the way over. It was a family joke, and that’s fine. I hope they bought a postcard to remember the architecture while they were at it, even if that wasn’t their interest. Life is not always a joke.
I had only one photograph in my memoir, An Iowa Life. However, I looked at a lot of them while writing it. A photograph invokes living memories and it was those memories that drove my writing. I expect to return to this image of Mount Rushmore when I get into the post-analog part of my life. For that purpose, it won’t matter if an image was one I took or a postcard. That’s as it should be.
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On Being From There
An early reader of my autobiography asked about this paragraph.
When I was born, Davenport was already a tired town. I hadn’t realized it, of course, because my family life was positive and supportive. I felt I could be anything I wanted, and this notion was reinforced once I started school. I grew up in a time of hope, despite challenges. We had vague knowledge of Davenport’s beginnings. I came to believe while being from there, I was not of there. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
“I am most surprised by your statement that you did not believe you were ‘of there.’ Looking for more explanation here,” they wrote.
In response, I wrote:
My mother and father brought a defined culture with them when they moved to Davenport and I was born. I came up in that culture, which for Mother was based in rural Illinois where she was born, and for Father, it was in western Virginia. In going through the history for this book, it occurred to me that I did not experience any culture indigenous to Eastern Iowa, but rather what my parents brought with them and lived. Yes, I was from Davenport, but not a person who grew up in a culture that was local. I contrast that with Provincial France where people are a literal extension of the soil, the sea, and the air. Mine was a distinctly American experience. (Letter to a friend, Sept. 6, 2025).
When I re-write the book, which I will once its companion is finished, I plan to add this explanation. As long as we live in a consumer society where the work to produce our lives lies in places, corporations, and people with whom we have no relationship, except for a commercial transaction, we cannot be of there, much though we yearn to be.
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This Week in Photos
As the garden turned from tomatoes to apples, I captured plenty of images. Here are some of them.
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A Life of Photos – Part VI
It felt like progress as I went through the prints laid out on a table from one shoe box of photographs. I bought some 4.25 x 6.25-inch brown envelopes into which I duly sorted the prints and labeled with the contents. Since prints are scattered all over the house, this should make it a). easier to find a home for loose ones, and b). enable whoever inherits the collection to move quickly through them with a clue as to what they are about. I even managed to pick a few to shred because the images were repetitive or hard for me to know what they were. There were six of those. That’s not many given the scope of the project yet it was a big, personal step. I ran right over to the shredder so there would be no going back.
The photo above was taken when in 1979, friends with whom I worked at a department store in high school visited me in Mainz, Germany. They had married while I was overseas. We drove a rental car around France, stopping whenever and wherever it suited us. We visited a number of cathedrals, including Reims and Amiens, as well as Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel, Belle-Île-en-Mer, Bordeaux, San Sebastián, Lourdes, Carcassone, and then traveled along the Mediterranean coast to Italy. We crossed the Swiss Alps from Italy and headed back home to Mainz. The two weeks were filled completely and passed quickly.
Hard to say where this sign was located. Somewhere on the Mediterranean Coast. The places we went on the coast were not very touristy. That was one of the ideas that energized the trip. We found our own path and the trip was better for it. We went places where an American Visa card was a novelty and the clerk had to contact someone to make sure it was legit.
I shot two or three rolls of film on my Minolta SRT-101 camera. The highlight of the trip was in Saint-Paul-de-Vence where we overnighted in a small hotel. The artist Joan Miró was in residence at the nearby Fondation Maeght where he was making a film for French television. It was interesting to see the director coaching the artist about how to move for the camera. We toured the gallery and bought posters of the show to remember it by. I framed and still have mine. Alas, no photos of the artist as it wasn’t allowed.
As an organizing principle, putting photos taken on a specific trip together is conventional. None of them found their way into an album, although the makings of one was there. In retrospect, It is hard to believe I could get two weeks away from work as a military officer. Images like this one help me remember how close I was to my small group of high school friends. Isn’t that one of the purposes of photography?
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
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