WRITE!

Okay, okay... so I've not been particularly prolific of late.

Today as I was doing a little cleaning (little being the operative word), I came across a book of writings I started in September of 2000, comprised mostly of never-to-be-sent letters to a woman I have known for over twenty years and for whom I have long held great affection.

We had met while I was working at MSU's Instructional Media Center. She was from another department, and had come to either drop off or pick up an order and I, well, was instantly smitten. I don't know that I'd quite call it love at first sight — in French, le coup de foudre (sorry, but my brain is awash in French at the moment!) — but it was surely one of those meetings in which I had to immediately shake my head clear and remind myself that I was married.

Those kind of moments didn't come all that often while I was married. Surely, I appreciated looking at other women (more glances of appreciation than gawking, by the way), but I was married to what I thought was a pretty special human being. By that time, I'm quite sure that Zachary had been born, so we were well on our way into family life. This in-my-head flirtation would have to quickly go its merry little way.

And, of course, it did. Such daydreams always dissipated before long, as I really, seriously had no intentions of being a loutish husband. Still, over the course of the next ten years, we would run into each other occasionally — either when she showed up at the office with a co-worker or when I happened to bump into her where she worked on a part-time basis, where I was delivering something for my wife.

As the years passed, our lives ran their very separate courses. In the early summer of 1995, I left my job at MSU and by the following winter stepped into the hell known as divorce. I moved out of my house in July of 1996, and while I had again gained full-time employment, I was continuing to do some photography on the side. One of the jobs that came my way was to document a some of the activities surrounding the local presentation of (the nationally touring) Phantom (Of The Opera).

There were a number of Gala parties which I was asked to attend and photograph. These parties occurred at several different homes in the East Lansing area (I photographed three), and at the conclusion of the parties, a bus would swing by (can buses "swing by" a neighbourhood?) and whisk the alcohol-imbibing socialites off to the Wharton Center on campus at Michigan State University, where yours truly would be waiting to photograph them as they proceeded up the red carpet.

As curtain time approached, I wandered into the Wharton Center and upstairs to take a few frames of people standing around in the foyer, waiting for the doors to open.

And there she was.

Dressed in black. I wish I could include the photograph that I took of her and her friend, but I had handed the prints and negatives over to the client. When I attempted to borrow them back, they couldn't be located. She wouldn't have wanted me to post it here anyway, so you'll have to take my word for it that she looked amazing.