vanity plates

RJ-44 (courtesy of Christine Power)

my mom's brother tells the story
of his father
my grandfather
who had vanity plates

rj-44

his initials
plus the year
he regained his
drivers license
after having it
taken away
likely for
drunk driving

rj lived in manhattan
and the story goes
that one day
while stopped
at a red light
someone came up
to his window
and asked him
if he could buy
the rights
to rj-44

that someone
was reggie jackson
number 44
of the
new york yankees

he was refused

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I originally wrote the above poem (or whatever you'd like to call it) based on a prompt I saw on a website I frequently visit, then thought I'd post it here as well, along with a photo of the license plate which my brother Jim obtained after our grandfather, Roy Newton Jones, died in November of 1980. As noted above, we learned about the supposed encounter between Reggie Jackson and grandpa from my mom's brother, Skip, who I can only assume learned about it from grandpa. The story is the reason Jim came home from the funeral in New York with the plate.

A few years ago, I contacted a friend of mine in New York City who used to work for Major League Baseball to see if there might be a way to contact Reggie Jackson to check on whether or not the story was true, but all she could suggest was that I try his Instagram account, which I did, but I got no response.

True or not, it's a great story.

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

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

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

If you're interested in commenting, please sign up at Blogger to do so. The spammers have yet again found a way to ruin something, so I've configured this blog to accept only comments I've read first.