6 January 2001

Windows
Ducks still gather
not far from the bridge
at the river’s bend.

Snow and frigid air
have narrowed
their hole
in the
ice.

I pass by
as they huddle
and wonder
where they’ll go
when that window
finally
closes.

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Collage

Penny Collage, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

I scanned the negatives for this today. I took the photographs used in this collage in either the summer of 1991 or 1992... leaning towards the latter. They were taken one weekend that Penny and I took the kids to Grand Haven State Park, which runs along the shore of Lake Michigan, about twenty minutes south of Muskegon, Michigan. It's probably the earliest example of my creating not-so-typical "panoramas" with my picture taking. Aside from possibly laying the original prints on top of each other way back then, I'd not thought about creating an actual collage out of them until today.

Penny Collage II, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

This second version includes our son, Zachary, but he got up while I was taking the series of photographs, so that's why he appears somewhat to be floating mid-air. Penny also moved a bit during the sequence, as she lowered her left arm and rested it across her right arm before raising it back to her chin. I like them both for different reasons.

At that time in my life, I mostly took pictures of the kids or Penny, or documented family gatherings, which, of course, is why I appear in so few of our family's photographs. I wasn't much of a photographer, really, despite that I had a 35mm camera and had photographed a few weddings. At best, I was a picture taker. Which is not to say that I didn't have ideas about being a photographer. (Many a set of negatives has a frame or two in which I attempted something "artsy"... something that caught my eye for one reason or another.)

In fact, it was about this time that I purchased a used medium format camera, a Mamiya RB67, and shortly after that, an auto-focus Nikon N90, along with a couple of lenses. While the N90 was sort of classified as a serious hobbyist or just-short-of-professional camera, the lenses were adequate only in their combined ability to cover a range from 28mm to 300mm: a Nikkor AF 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 and a Nikkor AF 75mm-300mm f/4.5-5.6. Neither lens was very fast so therefore not ideal for doing professional work, but I wasn't as informed as I should have been about camera gear when I bought it all.

While writing this, it occured to me that chances are high that I had the N90 by this time as one of the photographs on the same set of negatives was taken by my daughter, and I suspect that since it's in focus, it was the N90. The Nikkormat FTN I'd had been using since 1979 or so (and which I still have) likely would have been a struggle for her to use with her four- or five-year-old hands, especially since it was manual focus.

From the Back Seat

There's a chance, too, that the photographs were taken with Penny's point-and-shoot camera, but judging from the shallow-ish depth-of-field on several other frames (including those which make up the collage), it's not likely.

These negatives have been tucked away in boxes for nearly thirty years—so long that while I recognized the images in the collage, the photograph of me and Penny took me completely by surprise. Mainly because I just have no memory of it, but also because there are so few photographs with both of us in them.

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The Last Christmas

Christmas, 1994 — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

You couldn't possibly tell from the looks on our faces that this would be our last Christmas together as a family. But less than two months later, just before Zachary's tenth birthday, it all would come to a screeching halt.

As I continue to scan negatives from that period in my life—our lives—it is quite difficult to not also continue to process all that happened in the fifteen years leading up to that moment. I recall so many of my own missteps and misdeeds along the way, but mostly, I focus on the lack of real conversation about our marriage. I was, as Maggie Estep has so eloquently put it, an emotional idiot. I was unable to speak to Penny about the things that troubled me, whether it be about work or our relationship. Maybe because I was afraid to appear weak or fragile. Maybe because I was weak. Conversely, she chose not to talk to me, and instead talked to her friends, to an astrologer, and to her therapist. ("My therapist feels sorry for you.") I think she even might have talked to my older brother, who coincidentally left his wife not long before our split.

Anyway, I have been going down this little trip down memory lane for maybe a month or two. It's pretty inevitable, I suppose, to dwell on that period of time as the images appear on my screen, and to think about them and feel something, but instead of continuing to bottle up the thoughts and feelings I've held onto for so many years, I've decided to write about them. I've chosen, however, to not really promote these posts via Facebook... I'll just post and move on. If someone stumbles upon them and reads them, fine, but I'm not going to try to attract eyeballs. These posts are mostly intended for me to put into written form things I perhaps should have been saying with my mouth many years ago.

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28 October 1991

You kissed me this morning
on the lips
I didn't know how to react to that
I would have liked to kiss you too
and hold you
and kiss you again
but I didn't
I couldn't
yes, my feelings (as you say) have been hurt
I feel no different
than a stranger
in this bed
in your life
(hurt feelings indeed!)
"dropped like a tool no longer required"
is more like it
I don't expect that anything I feel
that anything I write or say
has much effect on your life
(but I write and sometimes speak)
I think of you
and us
and this thing we loosely call marriage
I wonder
what do I do?
what can I do to convince you
that I have made changes
significant ones
that I have recognized
things I blinded myself to before
(I think a lot)
then
it hits me
(it always hits me with a clarity
I have never known)
that it
really
really
really doesn't matter
what changes I make
(significant or otherwise)
what feelings I have
what thoughts I conjure
what words I utter—
you will do
what you will do
you will rely on the stars
intellectuals
and counselors
you will believe what they say
because you want to believe them
they will feel sorry for me
you will feel sorry for me
and you will kiss me

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12 October 1991

I am alone in this bed
I touch you with the trepidation
with which one might put a hand
(or head)
'neath a guillotine knife blade

I am alone in this bed
where once souls danced
now only bodies lie

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The Digitization of Memory

Penny, December 1980 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Sometimes I wonder how it is I recall the things I recall. Some of the oddest memories pop into my head when I least suspect them. Case in point: this past week, I recalled a day I had ridden my bike to visit a high school classmate either the summer following our Junior year or possibly the following year. So... either 1972 or 1973. The memory that remains pretty vivid with me is that at some point, we left his house to go to his older brother's place not all that far away. I don't recall the reason we went there as his brother wasn't home, so maybe it was to take his mail in or water plants or something. But while I sat in one of the chairs in the living room, he picked up and showed me a small spray can of mace, the type that postal carriers are known to keep on them in the event of a dog attack. He squirted just a minute amount into the air and it had me gagging. It was amazing how so little could spread so quickly.

I have lots of little memories like that stored in the crevasses of my brain, and they randomly come to the surface for almost no reason at the oddest times.

Another is one that I sort of documented in the above diptych. Because lately I've been doing so much scanning of negatives from photographs taken during the time I was married—mostly of the kids or Penny or family get-togethers—the photographs have spurred memories from those times. But I didn't need to see these two photographs to recall the moment. In fact, it was as I was scanning other negatives that I wondered where this set of negatives were because I had yet to come across them. These two photographs of Penny specifically came to mind, and along with them, the memory of the moment that I long have thought I'd fallen completely in love with her.

Penny and I had just gotten back to her place in Lansing from her parents' house in Laingsburg, which other photographs from that roll reminded me that we had attended her youngest sister's annual Christmas Pageant, a play she put on using her dolls and stuffed animals (featuring Kermit the Frog and Mrs. Beasley). For reasons I can't recall, I wanted to take Penny's picture before she entered the apartment. Maybe it was just how great she looked in her hooded coat against the backdrop of a snowy evening. It might have been that she asked me to. The skirt she wore that night, if memory serves, was one she had recently purchased at a small boutique in Lansing called Kilamanjaro. Again, if memory serves, she had done some artwork for the owner of the boutique, Mattie Robinson, so maybe the skirt was her payment.

What I do recall about the moment was such a small thing, really. Just as I raised the camera to my eye, she told me to hold on. She wanted the dress to be in the photo, so reached down (despite all she was holding) and pulled a small section of it out from under her coat. The photographs memorialized it.

So, I guess that's what I'm referring to as the digitization of memory. Not only am I scanning photographs that are historical visual records of fractions of moments in time, I'm scanning memories of those moments. I could have told this story without the photographs. That is, I didn't need the photographs to recall that moment. But I do like knowing that there is photographic evidence of it.

And now that I'm thinking about it, that moment was also the inspiration for a song I would write many years later:

We were married on a Christmas Day
A very long time ago, I must say
We walked through the snow
And we talked 'til the day turned to night

Time was not friendly, it went too fast
Our future too quickly became our past
It caught me off guard, I thought it would last
That it might

I guess I assumed that you felt the same
It seemed like you could, it seemed you became
A star I could follow, a treasure to claim
As my own

But somehow something clouded my view
I turned my head 'round and I lost track of you
A storm navigated by only a few
Hit my home

So now here we stand at the threshold again
Looking behind us and forward and then
Knowing too well that this might be the end
Of the light

We were married on a Christmas day
A very long time ago, I must say
We walked through the snow and we talked 'til the day
Turned to night

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Unless otherwise noted, all writings on this blog are copyright Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

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