(check it out) Even when I was in England the first couple of days I was so homesick that I took pictures halfheartedly because my camera loves my friend’s faces more than it loved London architecture. I got over that, though, pretty quickly on account of Big Ben and Big Jen, the Eiffel Tower trick photography, and the random group of UT students who quickly became my friends and who my camera really started to love. I had already posed, focused and clicked my way through beach shots for 6 years of posing on the patio before we at dinner, looking down at the cobblestone on river street, writing words in the sand, waking up early and padding barefoot down to the beach to take pictures of sunrises, playing dress-up on Broughton, Pose, Focus, Click, Click Click. I love these pictures, and love pictures in general, and think whoever invented the camera deserves a freaking nobel prize for figuring out how to freeze moments in time to give us a tangible, visible moments to hold, posed or candid. It fills in where memory can be thin. It’s really remarkable. And if I had a superpower I would have a secret camera that would let me take pictures of little things all the time,I would just look at strangers and cute little babies and ordinary things and I would turn into the secret paparazzi of beautiful things and just take little pictures all the time. But because this superpower has not yet been realized and because my camera is being a little beligerent and because I already have six years of smiling sunkissed faces, I didn’t pull my little camera out of it’s little sock at all this year. NO more 3x5's as Mr. John Mayer sang. Instead of the, pose focus click pictures, but I summoned my superhuman camera and tried to catch things a 3x5 really couldn’t. Basically God posed these little candid moments and focused my attention and I clicked a little memory.
Here are some of those little pictures I took, without my camera.
On the way down Abby and I set out together. From St. John Court in Farragut to Tybee Island. or bust. As usual, Abby was the driver and the navigator, and I was the ipod DJ and the car dancer. I believe I started car dancing on Grisby Chapel and continued onto I-40, Through Knoxville, all the mountain roads, I had moves even I had never seen. If you happened to have passed a jeep wrangler Saturday morning you would have seen one girl calming driving her passenger agressively shooing away a swarm of invisible bees. I wore myself out. I looked at her somewhere in North Carolina and said, Abby I think I’m gonna sit this one out. She said, good. you deserve it. go get a drink of punch from the refreshment table. I took this picture with my mind, of Abby letting me play IPOD commando, laughing at me, half secretly brooding over my mad dancing skills, half wishing I would settle down at 8:30 in the morning. There are few things I love more than a good road trip with my sister so I took a picture and I wouldn’t have car danced like that with just anybody. CLICK.
I took another picture of me telling her something my brother had said and her leaning over her steering wheel and horse laughing. Because they are the funniest 2 people I know, I pointed my camera right at her and clicked.
I went to this little bitty church on the Island literally the size of a chapel. There were about 30 people in the pews and I was the youngest person by about 25 years. I sat down and wondered at what it would be like to live on this little island and be one of this little family of faith and come to the wooden chapel Sunday. The service was totally eclectic, on one hand it was highly liturgal, straight out of the Book of Common Prayer but also had songs out of an African-American Spiritual and we sang “Marching to Zion” after communion. The woman who gave the sermon seriously reminded me of Mimi. All I could think about was Jimmy Hawkins and how much he would have loved her and how much I which he had been there at that moment. She talked about the convention she had gone to recently she described just about every detail, about how she always got to the lecture hall early and always got chosen to administer communion, which was, “such a blessin’”. She took out the apron she got for volunteering at her convention and put it on this bright yellow apron over her white long robe and walk around in it for the rest of service. During communion she started to sway and bounce a little behind the communion table loosely to the tune of whatever was playing on the organ which I can only assume her little jig was to spice up the liturgy. And when it was time to go to the table, I walked up and kneeled at atlar and the old man who gave me communion held the cracker in his old hands and pressed it hard into my palm and said softly, Body of Christ. And I looked up at him into his old eyes, bowed my head, closed my eyes and took my picture.
Abby and I rented bikes. It was one of the first time I’ve ridden a bike since I was a kid in my mom’s neighborhood, probably with the obligatory kool-aid mustache. I felt like this kid:
It was a beach bike riding festivus for the rest of us and we rode every single place. I felt like I was Vada Sultenfuss in My Girl when she and Thomas J would ride bikes or one of the girls in the epic girlhood classic Now and Then. Abby and I broke out into a duet of a bumpy bike rendition of My Girl on that bike path and I gripped my handle bars and pedaled out my picture. Click.
Then Abby said, Well I guess it’s a little harder to bike dance than to car dance. And I rose to the challenge and proved her wrong. And took another picture.
Differnent people have come to the beach with us each year, and this year is no different. This year we had Anne and Margaret, who are two wonderfully Scottish (yet English speaking!) and wonderfully sweet women who have been friends since they both lived in Fargo. Anne is a very young 79 and can stand just about everything but the oppressive Savannah heat, and, frankly, I’m right there with her. She was married to John for 58 years before he died this past June. Anne still talks about him and laughs and makes amazing rhubarb pie and buys purple outfits and takes “moons over tybee pictures” with two other outrageous women. We went up to the condo that Anne and Margaret were staying in a few nights ago to talk and eat pie and interrupt their movie. I walked right in and sat down beside her and looked around, expecting dirty looks from everyone else because I knew I had just taken the best seat in the house. And really it was all I could do not to ask her a million questions, about what it was like to meet John on a train car in Scotland. And what it was like to be with someone for 58 years and move and raise children and how in the world is she so brave to live without him now. But I stayed quiet and sat on the couch and leaned against her and listened to the Scottish hens cluck. and took my picture.
I finished reading Dorothy Day laying on the beach. In the epilogue she had written, that “We have all known the long loneliness.” And I walked to edge of the water by myself and took a picture. and I knew that it was true. We have all known the long loneliness.
But even these pictures don’t do it all justice. Because you can’t feel the sand in between your toes and the heat on your face. You can’t ride against the wind and watch the sand blow against the shore. You can't hear the old ladies talk in their scottish accents or lay on your back in the ocean and taste the saltwater sea mixed with my watermelon gum. Just like John said, I guess you just had to be with me.
