It’s a strange thing, this project. The point of it is to raise money for cancer research. So some days I feel a lot of pressure to create a photograph that someone might want to hang on the wall. That is hard to do on any given day, but I’m not sure that it is possible to do every day. Some days the brain is empty and the best idea is one that you know no one will want. I went into this having accepted that some days the picture would be crap and I just have to cringe and keep moving forward.
Today isn’t one of those days. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
March 5, 2016 brought me to this exact spot, only on that day I was sobbing and broken. Junior high can do that to people, I guess, but I wasn’t in junior high. I was several miles into an 18 mile run. Running can also make you cry, but it wasn’t just the run that day. Fortunately, I had a lot of support or I wouldn’t have finished the run that day. That was a pretty bad day.
But if you rewinded time about 25 years the same spot was a much different place. Instead of cones imagine a silver Saab 900 pulling up to the curb blasting Strength by The Alarm (who will be playing on Friday here in Salt Lake) with a cool twenty-something in his aviator sunglasses at the wheel and his sub-90 pound blonde haired brother riding shotgun. A couple of his friends were in the back seat also getting a ride to school.
When I reminded Matt about those days, when he tried to make me much cooler than I was (unsuccessfully I’m afraid) his description of those days was, “When we were young and the world was ours.”
So, this picture reminded me of some really good times and one incredibly bad one. I realize that there are possibly three people on the face of the planet who might want a copy of this picture and two of them likely would only want it to be supportive of this project. So, the picture for the day probably won’t help me reach my goal of raising $1000 for cancer research, and that’s ok. Some pictures are going to be like that, some pictures may attract the attention of people because they find them irresistible, some are just going to get a trophy for participation, and there will hopefully be some that speak to the heart.
Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.