Cat and Her Early Morning Surprise

Cat in the Window — ©2025 Patrick T. Power.

When my former wife, Penny, and I were still rather early in our relationship—I'm guessing sometime in 1980—we went out to her mother's adoptive parents' home on Woodbury Road in Laingsburg, Michigan to get a cat. Actually, I don't recall now if we went out there specifically to get a cat, but while we were there, we made the decision to bring one home to her place. The cat that lived on the Criders' farm had recently given birth to six or seven kittens, and with little deliberation, we brought home the runt of the litter. We had a tough time deciding upon a name, though. I recall that I thought Tuck was worthy of consideration. Ultimately, we settled on Cat, a name that later morphed into Big Fat Cat or BFC.

Like a lot of cats, Cat wasn't much into being held. She would lie on our laps if we had an afghan draped over us, but didn't generally care to show much affection for us. When she was hungry, especially in the wee hours of the morning, she would chew on whatever she knew would wake us up, whether books or record album covers. Somehow, she knew it was annoying to the point to get action. And it was more than just the sound of paper tearing, it was clack-clack sound of her gums (or whatever) coming together and then separating time after time after time.

Cat's handywork (mouthy-work?)

One very early morning years later, after we'd married and moved to Lansing from Toledo, where we'd lived for about two years (and where Cat's decision to pee on a carpet cost us a rental deposit), the sound of Cat gnawing on something woke us. The sound was coming from beneath and behind Penny's drawing table which was on the opposite side of the room from the bed. We discussed what it was she was chewing at when all of a sudden, she let out a "yaoow" amongst a flurry of paper, work that Penny had tucked between the table and the wall.

We quickly surmised that she'd chewed through the electrical wire leading from the wall to the desk lamp and got shocked. After a few seconds of silence, and breaking the tension of the moment, Penny asked, "Do you think she's dead?" At which I think we both burst out laughing.

I got out of bed and went into the living room to check on her. Cat was panting heavily but she otherwise seemed fine.

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The Artist Project

Carol Wansley (outtake, crop) ©2025 Patrick T. Power

I've been on a negative scanning jag of late, gearing up to complete a project that I should have taken care of years ago, so I thought I'd write about this little project of mine back in the mid-1990s.

In late 1994, after I'd left my job at Michigan State University, I tried to make a go of freelancing as a photographer. I got hired by the Lansing Art Gallery to photograph an exhibition by Brian Whitfield in November of that year, and again to photograph items in the gallery for their upcoming Holiday Art Market. I had a conversation with the gallery director at the time, Karen Stock, and I asked about the possibility of having a show of portraits at the gallery sometime, which, as I think back on it now, I had no business suggesting such a thing as my portrait experience up until that time had been fairly limited to whatever I would have done while at MSU, along with an internship I'd done for school in the summer of 1980. But I had an idea. I don't recall now when the specifics of the idea had hatched in my mind but the plan was to photograph a number of Lansing-area visual artists in a studio setting. I had purchased a used Mamiya RB67 a few years earlier, along with a lighting kit, a softbox, and background gear, and I was champing at the bit to use it for purposes other than taking pictures of the kids and the occasional group photograph for hire.

Because my then-wife Penny was an artist, I'd become acquainted with quite a few other artists through her, so after getting the go-ahead from Karen, I made up a wish list and began making phone calls and scheduling people. At the same time, I managed to procure in-kind support from Kodak (film), John Manning at Photo Connexion (photographic paper), and Larry Carr at Photo Mart (darkroom facilities). Since I didn't have a studio per se, I had to wrangle up space somewhere. Penny had graciously (I think) agreed to let me use her ArtSpace studio/classroom when it was free of activity, but with as many classes as she was conducting, I had to work around her schedule. I also had to find an alternative for when it wasn't free.

I had volunteered a bit around that time for the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a local folk music and dance organization, mostly helping to set up and tear down sound equipment or re-arrange seats for their concerts, but also on several occasions to photograph the Residents Night performers. Residents Night was a concert made up of local musicians donating their time to raise funds for the organization. (For a spell, I also served as Residents Night Co-ordinator.)

Residents Night, 20 October 1993 ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Most of the Fiddle's concerts were held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in East Lansing for a more-than-reasonable fee of one dollar, if memory serves, so I checked with the church's caretaker, Regina Fry, to see if I might also be able to rent the room off the main room of the church. I got the OK, so my first bunch of photo sessions were set up, with the first one to be held at ArtSpace on 19 December 1994. Barb Morris, owner of Otherwise Gallery, which was right next door to ArtSpace on Turner Street in Lansing's Old Town area, was the first; Jill Lareaux was the second. For Barb, I had an idea of what I wanted to do and had sketched it out on paper, but with Jill, I just winged it. She appeared in a beautiful white blouse that I felt had be photographed against a dark backdrop as it seemed to shimmer.

 

The next twelve would be done at the church on three separate days:

20 December 1994 — Dennis Preston and Brian Whitfield

 

26 January 1995 — Jim McKenzie, Jane Rosemont, Carol Wansley, Paul Thornton, and Regina Fry

 

 

1 February 1995 — James Adley, Kate Darnell, Clif and Jane McChesney, Liz Wylegala, and Bruce Thayer

 

 

I did the the next five at ArtSpace on the 9th of February:

Robert Busby, Mark Beard, Jean Rooney, Mark Mahaffey, and Kelly Boyle

 

 

Larry Carr at Photo Mart provided a darkroom for me to print the 11-inch by 14-inch prints, and I pumped out two of each portrait—one for the show and one to give to each artist. I was certain that I'd properly exposed the film for everything so I decided to not use polycontrast paper (I think I used Ilford paper) for the prints. Without bogging you down with technical details, I'll just say that while that choice worked out for me for the most part, there was one portrait, Jane Rosemont's, for which I wish I'd had just a little bit more control over the final print's contrast.

Then came the second week of February, and Penny informed me she wanted out of our marriage.

I don't recall now how it came about, but in early March, I took some time off from everything and took a train to Washington, D.C., where I stayed with a friend I'd met at a biomedical photo conference in Rochester, New York about ten years earlier. So much about that trip is a blur to me now. I don't know why I chose D.C.

Distance, I guess. And time.

Upon my return, and with less than a month to take the remaining portraits, print them, and get them framed, I dove back in, scheduling the remaining nine artists, including Penny, all of which took place at ArtSpace:

18 March 1995 — Teresa Petersen and Regina Fry (re-takes)

 

19 March 1995 — Margaret Meade-Turnbull and Barbara Hodge Borbas

 

25 March 1995 — Penny Krebiehl-Power

31 March 1995 — Mark Mahaffey (re-takes)

As for the two retakes, I'd made the mistake of showing Regina Fry the proofs from her session, something I hadn't done with anyone else. She didn't like them. My feeling was (and still is) that it was my project—I wasn't Olan Mills—and therefore had the right to choose the content of my show. She would refuse to participate in the project if I used them. I didn't want to be a dick about it so I relented and did a second session. Ultimately, I'm glad I did, as I do like my final choice, but I was perfectly happy with the first set. I was not at all happy with Mark Mahaffey's, however, so I sheepishly asked him to come back for another session.

I can't recall why, but I had to find another place to print my enlargements once all the portraits had been taken. Enter Bill Harrison at Custom Photographic. Unlike Photo Mart, where I hand processed the prints in trays, I ran them through a machine at Custom, which turned out to be a blessing as it cut down considerably on the time needed to get everything printed. My preference was hand-developing as I believed it to be a more archival process, but time was of the essence. With the printing finished, it was off to see Bill Hankins at Prints, Ancient & Modern to have everything framed for the show, which had to be hung on Monday the 3rd of April. The show would open the next day, and there would be an opening reception on the Sunday the 9th, coinciding with the 14th annual Botanical Images Competition. I'd informed Bill in advance as to the number of frames and their size (they were all something like 16-inch by 20-inch) so that once all the prints were done, his team could go at it.

During one of my trips to Prints, Ancient & Modern, Judith Taran, East Lansing's communications director, and wife of Irv Taran, a professor of art at Michigan State University, informed me that my portraits should have been taken in the artists' studios or in some way with their work. I stood there rather aghast that the wife of an artist would question another artist's choices. I can't recall how I responded, but I wondered if she similarly told her husband how to paint.

Everything went off as planned. There was a pretty good turnout of friends and family (my mom and sister-in-law even made it up from Toledo), along with a number of the artists and their friends. Nothing sold, although I didn't really expect any would. It wasn't intended a money-making venture.

An interesting thing happened once the show came down. My interest in photography took a nose dive. For a good five years leading up to the show, I had immersed myself in photography books and magazines. I'd spent a lot of time working on lighting techniques at work and at home. I had the kids pose for me, and occasionally got Penny to. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the artists and getting to know them a little bit as I completed this project, but all of a sudden, my interest fell flat, thanks mostly to what was going on at home. It wouldn't rekindle for almost ten years when I discovered Flickr.

As I look back on the experience, and as I look again at the contact proofs from all the portraits, I've come to have second and third thoughts about some of the choices I made for the show. I know that at least one other person other than Regina—Liz Wyegala—wasn't pleased with my selection, but in my defense, to know Liz is to know she's an emphatic way of speaking and often uses her hands when she does. I really felt it was representative. As is clear with many of the portraits, looking at the camera wasn't a requirement.

Also in retrospect, I was a fish out of water, so to speak. I didn't know the first thing about the etiquette of art exhibitions, and I know I didn't thank Karen Stock enough, or, I suspect, in a more appropriate fashion. As I alluded to above, I did give the participating artists who attended the show a copy of their portrait. Not all attended so I still have a handful stashed in a box with the negatives. As I was preparing to move to San Francisco in January of 2010, I contacted as many of the artists as I could and gave them the framed versions of their portraits. A few went unclaimed.

And sadly, in the thirty years since this project took place, seven of the artists have died: Mark Beard, Barb Morris, James Adley, Jim McKenzie, Clif and Jane McChesney, and Robert Busby. Mark Beard and Robert Busby were the biggest shocks as Mark died because he'd accidentally been given the wrong medication while in the hospital for a minor issue; Robert was murdered by someone he had given assistance to.

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Nick

Nick — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

If you look closely at the photograph, you can see that Nick is chained to the back porch post. That's because our back yard wasn't secured by a fence with a gate. We were renting a house on Mosley Avenue (I always thought it was Mosley Street) at the time, and while there were fences dividing our property from our neighbours, there wasn't one which totally enclosed the back yard.

Nick came into our lives in a rather odd fashion. I came home from work one day to find that a woman had stopped her car in front of our house and asked our kids, who were playing in the yard, if they would watch her dog for a while while she went to the store. Since I wasn't there, I don't really know how it all went down, but they agreed, I guess, and the woman never returned.

Nick was a sweet creature. He was good with our kids and the neighbourhood kids. He didn't seem to have a mean bone in his body. He did, however, have a serious problem with strangers who approached the house. He would go completely nuts. Of course, it didn't help that—in order to keep him from running around the neighbourhood, and possibly getting run over by a car—we had kept him chained up. At first to the porch, and later to a stake in the ground and with a longer chain. It no doubt made him even more territorial.

Once, he nipped at a boy delivering the advertiser newspaper, and another time, he pulled himself free from the stake and went after the woman delivering mail. She advised us that she wouldn't deliver our mail if she saw that our front door was open or that Nick was in the yard. Naturally, we complied, but not long after that, we got a letter from the Post Office telling us that we had to get rid of Nick (I believe the actual word was "destroy") or face a lawsuit. Feeling as though we had no real option, I took Nick to the veterinarian to have him put down.

I don't recall that we considered taking him to a shelter or if one even existed. I do recall that we considered taking him far out into the country and letting him go, but also feared what that might mean—both for him and anyone who might confront him. There had to have been options we didn't consider at the time, and it remains one of the greatest regrets of my life that I couldn't save his.

According to my notation, I wrote the following lines on 16 May 1992 (with more planned that never came to be), but my memory tells me that it was earlier than that:

The neighbour's dog has come for you
she sniffs the backyard stair
and walks away without a clue
as I sweep away your hair.

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Diane Keaton + A Random Memory

Promotional photo for Hair by Kenn Duncan

I believe that Diane Keaton made her biggest impression on me in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. When I looked at her filmography today, I recognized that I would have seen her in the first installment of The Godfather (I didn't bother with the other two), and in three earlier Allen films, but it wasn't until Annie Hall that her name and face really took hold.

At that time, I was a Woody Allen fan, and as he had been in a relationship with Keaton for a number of years, she appeared in eight of his films, as best as I can tell: Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In fact, post-Annie Hall, she was as much a reason to see Allen's films as his involvement with them. Maybe it was her girl-next-door beauty and charm. Maybe it was because there often seemed to be little space between herself and the character she portrayed that lent authenticity to her performances.

While Annie Hall might have been pivotal as regards how Keaton came to be notable in my mind's memory (as I think about this now, her role in Play It Again, Sam, which I watched again last night, likely contributed as well), it was her role in Looking For Mr. Goodbar—or perhaps more accurately, the film itself—which had a significant impact on me. I don't recall now that I knew much about the film prior to going to see it. I might have seen a Siskel-Ebert review... I honestly can't say. That it starred Keaton was probably the biggest factor in my wanting to see it.

At the time, I was seeing a woman I had met at school, Robin, and during the Christmas-New Year break that year, after being "a couple" for a few months, I drove from Toledo to her family's home near Pittsburgh to meet her parents. Robin was cute and sweet and kind and smart. Bubbly. Also... religious. Her grandfather had been a minister, as would her father, I think, later in life. That said, I don't recall now that our time together was the constant push and pull you might expect between a Bible thumper and an atheist. We enjoyed each other's company and spent a great deal of our time out of class together.

The film was released in October of 1977, so only a couple of months before my trip to Beaver Falls (home town of Joe Namath and Papa John Creach, by the way). I stayed with Robin's family for probably a couple of nights, and one evening, we drove into Pittsburgh to the Showcase Cinemas to see the film. As I try to recall the evening, I can only imagine that she cringed through the whole thing, as Keaton's character was a school teacher by day and a barhopper by night who came home with a variety of men to fulfill either her sexual desires or to paint over her loneliness. Ultimately, she is murdered by a young man who had issues of his own, particularly as regards his sexuality. The scene is quite shocking, and the swift viciousness of the attack was almost as unexpected for me as it might have been for the victim.

Robin and I left the theatre stunned. Considering her rather Pollyanna life until then, it had to have been a brutal assault on her senses. I doubt she had ever seen such an emotionally charged, graphic film, much less one that depicted a world so different than the one she'd known up until then. I recall that she cried, but I don't recall that we talked much—if at all—about it on the way back to the house. As I think about it these many years later, I wonder if she thought I was depraved to have exposed her to such a shocking film, or that I had intended on dragging her into that kind of world.

We've been in touch sporadically over the years, and I think she managed to find some sort of forgiveness for my transgression, but she and Diane Keaton remain inexorably tied in my mind because of the film.

The random memory I had regarding Diane Keaton actually doesn't involve her, but seeing the above promotional photograph for the Broadway production of Hair in the 1970s spurred the memory I have of being in New York at the time the musical was running. My mom's father lived in Manhattan, and we stayed in Staten Island with Mom's best friend, Gladys, and her family. Making the trip to Manhattan meant riding the Staten Island Ferry. Since Hair was currently running, there were posters advertising it at the ferry terminal. I seem to recall that the posters were of a larger—mostly nude—group, which added a little more controversy to an already controversial play, but it might very well have been the above photo or one of several from that same session taken by Kenn Duncan. That's it. That's my memory.

Since beginning this post, I've re-watched Play It Again, Sam, Love and Death, and Annie Hall, and have watched a few clips of her appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman, and it's just so hard to grasp that her vibrance is gone from this world.

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Anniversary

Wedding Day, 7 August 1982

Is there a name for an anniversary that is no longer celebrated?

Today, while tending to my routine of posting deck logs to a Facebook group dedicated to the history of the USS Zircon (PY-16), one of the two ships my dad served on during World War II, I naturally had to look at the date on the log sheet. While the year was 1942, the day was the 7th of August, the date on which I would get married forty years later.

When I recall that day, my mind often refers back to the photographs that my then-bride Penny's sister Paula took using my Nikkormat FTN 35mm camera. The above photo is one that often sticks in my memory as it's one that years later—at the time we were going through our split up—Penny would point to (literally or figuratively, I can't recall) as proof that I didn't want to be married, or words to that effect. And because I am nothing if not a rehasher of the past, I've often thought about those remarks, picture or no picture.

Of course, those words, on their face, are not true. I did want to be married to her. But I just didn't know what that meant. At just over three years, our relationship had been my longest to date, and for most of that time we lived a little over two hours apart—I in Bowling Green, Ohio, and she in Lansing, Michigan. I lived with her for about three weeks while I commuted back and forth to Jackson, Michigan for a job I had as part of an internship, but by and large, we didn't spend a whole lot of time together until after I'd graduated. I recall living with her for a spell in which I took a piddly job with some kind of mail-order operation that didn't last long, but I eventually went back to Toledo to work with Lane Drug, a pharmacy-convenience chain which had stores throughout northwestern Ohio, and owned an East Coast company, Peoples Drug, which was fairly massive.

While the relationship seemed to be heading toward marriage, we didn't talk about it much. As best as I can recall, we didn't talk about our aspirations as regards children or career goals, but we seemed compatible in so many ways. Penny's folks approved of me, and I got along well with her siblings. Her mom had been adopted as a young girl, and Penny had a pretty close relationship with her mom's adoptive parents, especially her grandmother, Laverne. If memory serves, sometime in 1981 Laverne took a fall or two and—as seems to be typical in such cases—developed pneumonia and/or other complications. During this time, Penny brought up marriage; she wanted to tell Laverne that we were getting married. It wasn't a proposal per se, it was more like a strong suggestion, but of course, I agreed. Laverne would die in September of that year.

We agreed that the wedding would be a simple one, and the plan was to hold it on the front lawn at her parents house just outside Laingsburg, Michigan proper. Penny had great affection for the large tree just outside the front door of the house, and that's where she wanted the ceremony to take place. We agreed to invite a very limited number of guests, which would bend the noses of a few of her life-long friends, but neither of us were big-time partiers, so something low-key was best served by inviting fewer than seventy people.

As I was in Ohio for most of the year leading up to the event, Penny took care of most of the details. She designed the invitations and had them printed, she made her own dress, she had the rings of silver made by a local artist. I think her dad took care of procuring a canopy or two to cover the food. My biggest contribution besides saying "OK" a lot was probably putting together the mix tape (which kicked off with this), and—on the day of the wedding—running speaker wire from her parents' living room to the outdoors and mounting speakers on the house's exterior. I also brought the camera and film for the pictures.

The pictures.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most marriages are a first time occasion for the couples involved. Getting married was absolutely new to me, but also, I have to admit, was making public displays of affection. On this particular day, I had no clue about what to do with my hands or my body. Why didn't I take Penny's hand? you might ask. Yeah, I wonder about that, too. Why didn't I stand closer to her? I have no answer, really, other than that maybe... MAYbe it had something to do with the fact that in all the weddings I'd ever seen, the couples actually only unite once the vows are spoken. I'm kind of grasping at straws, because I was totally enamoured with Penny and thrilled that I was the lucky one to be standing so awkwardly to her right.

Ultimately, though, the marriage didn't work out. I honestly feel as though Penny was ready to call it quits not long after our son Zachary was born in February of 1985. I was so ill-prepared to be a good husband or partner. For one, I spent more time at work than I did at home. Not because the job meant more to me than she did—far from it—I was just not good at what I was supposed to be doing, and I lived in constant fear of losing the job and the relatively good income that supported us. It was something that I kept to myself when I came home, as I wanted neither to burden her with my crap nor to admit to my weakness. A guy thing, I guess. This went on year after year after year until it came to a head ten years later and I felt compelled to resign. Whatever fine, scintilla of a thread that might have been holding the marriage together snapped that day. Yes, there was so much more to it than that, but that was a huge factor, and one which I think led to everything else.

We've now been divorced for over twice as long as we were married. It took a while but for several years now, the 7th of August has passed without notice (as has 22 June, the date we met), but as I still have four years worth of deck logs to post at Facebook, it'll probably be at least that long before the date doesn't bring back the best of the memories from that day and those times.

Penny and Me

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