People and things are so easy to lose it’s a wonder we end up anywhere with anything to show. The future too is insecure and can be misplaced as easily as the little pocket items of the past—more easily in fact because each step misguides us from a place we’ll never reach and people we might have bumped into directly we see instead only peripherally if at all and without knowing them as we pass by beyond their embrace. At least that’s how it seems to a teenager in love with love. It all sounds very lonely on paper; instead, there are two people close at hand for every one we fail to meet. A boy whose Dad I cherish will die before he reaches my age; a man whose son’s devotion I love is already too old. I once closed my eyes and thought about life as a circle that whizzed around me like a gyroscope wheel while the axis it spun on spun on an axis in turn and I at the center had brief clear visions of all my alternative futures and was struck with dread. I came to clutching a flagpole in a park I’d never seen dizzy and screaming like a newborn upended and slapped. A bit unbalanced ever since, I wouldn’t think of shooting without a tripod. I take mostly pictures of wind and hang them here to sell. This gallery seems real enough, but it’s already memory and smoke and this lovely boy and his dear Dad are breezes through the laundry on the line, unseen movers of a heart no realer than mine. I love them both, swear to Christ I do, but with the right f/stop and a too-quick fix I could make it all look very dark indeed.

Copyright © November 15, 2007 David Hodges