Meeting Penny

This is, I'm quite sure, the first photograph I ever took of the woman I once was married to, Penny. The mother of my children. I don't like to use the term ex-wife, although sometimes I do. I never use the truncated version, ex. I've always felt that there is a certain animosity implied when a person uses either of the terms, and, well, I just don't use them. (Which is not to say that there isn't some animosity. Heh!)

I have been scanning a lot of photographs lately. Most of them have been photos I took with my first 35mm camera, a Nikkormat FTN, which I'd purchased from my college roommate, Lou Perlaky. He'd gotten it from his father, whose Social Security number is etched in the bottom plate of the camera. Lately, the negatives I've been so diligently, systematically scanning are from a portrait series I shot in late 1994 and early 1995 for my first and only solo photographic exhibit, The Artist Project. The exhibition ran for a month in the spring of 1995 at the Lansing (Michigan) Art Gallery (Thank you, Karen Stock!), in its salon, and featured portraits of twenty-three Lansing-area visual artists, one of whom was Penny.

I scanned the negatives according to the date I shot them, starting with Barb Morris on 19 December 1994 and ending with a re-shoot of Mark Mehaffey on 31 March 1995. In somewhat of a twist of fate, I began scanning the next to last set of negatives—from Penny's session—sometime yesterday*. At some point, I happened to look at the clock on the computer and saw that the date was 22 June, the day that I met her in 1980. I would bet that she has no memory of the date that we met, but almost every year, for at least a moment, it occurs to me.

I was on an internship for school that summer, traveling around Ohio and Michigan photographing families at their churches for United Church Directories, an Ohio company. The churches would provide space to shoot the portraits and volunteers to assist with clerical stuff, and UCD would provide the photographer, a photographic church directory of its congregation, and (I think) one 8" x 10" photograph to each family, in the hopes that the families would buy additional prints, which, of course, they usually did.

Before shooting any portraits that summer, I had to go through a week's worth of training with an experienced UCD photographer, so I drove up from Toledo to Lansing, Michigan on the 20th to meet John Thompson, who had been with the company for some time. I took a room at the Red Roof Inn just off the northbound Jolly Road exit of US-127, then met John the next day to begin shooting a church in Mason, about twenty minutes south of Lansing. On the first day of training, I think I met John at the church. He lived in Grand Rapids, and so made an hour-and-a-half commute. On the second day, John and his wife, Karen, both met me at the motel. Karen made plans to spend the day in East Lansing with her best friend, Penny, so she drove a separate car. At some point during the day, it was decided that I would join John, Karen and Penny for dinner once John and I wrapped up for the day.

I didn't know anything about Penny, of course, so had no expectations. When John and I arrived at the now-defunct restaurant/nightclub at the Meridian Mall in Okemos, The Backstage (so named because of its location directly across from the cinemas at the mall), Karen and Penny were sitting at a table, as was another man, Rick, who I assumed to be Penny's boyfriend. About all I recall from the evening is that I was instantly smitten with her. I couldn't keep my eyes off her.

That evening, or perhaps it was the next, I was invited to stay with John and Karen at their apartment in Grand Rapids and simply make the commute with John each day. It seemed to make sense, I guess, even though my travel expenses would have been reimbursed by UCD. It gave me a chance to get to know John and Karen, so, I accepted the invitation. On the drives back and forth, I quizzed John a bit about this gorgeous woman. I joked (not really) about setting me up with her. I probably asked what the situation was with this Rick fellow, but he had little, if anything, to tell me. I do recall, however, John telling me that I didn't want to have anything to do with her. I didn't press him for the reasons, although I sensed he didn't want to share what he would have liked to tell me. Nonetheless, I didn't let it drop. During dinners, I would tease Karen about setting me up with Penny. She laughed it off.

It was during dinner, one night, that Penny called. After talking with Karen for a while, she asked to talk to me. Whoa! Heart, meet throat.

Something was going on here. It was one of those movie storylines that doesn't ever happen in real life, but was happening in real life.

One night that week, after work, the four of us met again at Rick's American Café, a basement bar in East Lansing. Supposedly, she was to meet her friend Rick there to celebrate his birthday. I don't know if that was true, and well, I didn't care. We drank and listened to the music of Newt and the Salamanders. I swung my knee over to bump hers and told her, "I kneed you." She laughed. Not the wonderfully raucous laugh I would eventually come to know and love, but a laugh nonetheless. Rick never showed. Before heading back to Grand Rapids, we kissed in the parking lot where once stood a theatre.

My training period with John was cut short by UCD, as there was a church in Bloomfield Hills that the company wanted me to shoot. I don't know if a photographer had fallen ill, or if there was no one else available. Whatever the reason, I made plans to head east to the Detroit area, with an overnight stop in Lansing. Yes, with Penny.

After my one-day stint in Bloomfield Hills, I headed back home to Toledo, then photographed a church in St. Joseph, Michigan, and another in Decatur, I think, before getting the call to spend the better part of two weeks in Jackson, Michigan shooting a rather large Catholic Church, St. Mary Star of The Sea. Penny offered to put me up for the duration—I accepted, of course—and on one of the very hot days (it was one of the hottest stretches of weather ever in Michigan, as I recall) came to meet me when my shooting for the day was finished. That's when I took the above photo (and she a couple of me) using the already positioned light set-up and company camera.

Many people associate smells with memories. I don't. I have never had much of a sense of smell. So, most of my memories seem to be related to and triggered by my sight, and very often by old photographs. So it was again this weekend as I scanned the negatives of portraits I'd shot during one of the most difficult periods of my life, only to see that I'd be scanning the last photographs I would take of Penny, on the anniversary of the day that I met her.

 

*I actually began writing this late on the 22nd, not finishing it until sometime on the 24th.