Halcyon Flickr Days

tribute, ©2005 Phil Hilfiker. Some rights reserved.

The other day, as I was going through my Flickr stream (or feed, or whatever it's called these days), looking for photographs for Part One and Part Two of my story about my not-quite last day in Paris in November of 2005, I looked at comments at various photos along the way, sometimes clicking on a commenter's name to see if by some miracle they were still active on Flickr. Overwhelmingly, they more often were not. This made me sad because at one time, Flickr meant so much to so many people. Hell, had it not been for Flickr, I probably never would have gone to Paris in that fall of 2005, or ever for that matter. But one of my contacts thought so much of my photography—which I would be the first to say was not particularly special, especially in those days—to invite me to stay with her and her family. That, as I've said before, is another story for another time.

I'm not sure how I got to the photograph above, but once I did, all the joy of being on Flickr in those times came rushing back. In the event you didn't click on the photograph to see the text beneath it (you should, by the way), it was taken by my friend Phil on the first anniversary of his having created a Flickr account. His words give a little idea as to what the community was like at the time, which was tremendously supportive and... communal.

It was also VERY playful. Memes (alas, not everybody tagged their photos for this one) were created and spread quickly around the site. An entire group was created for images built upon other people's photos, many of which would build upon another person's already Photoshop'd masterpiece. I don't know how it came to be known as Big Al Davies Collage Squad other than that maybe it had to do with Big Al's visage showing up in so many of them in the beginning.

One of mine, a favourite...

Big Al: Botanical Photographer. Some rights reserved.

I merged a photo that Al had posted of himself in his stream and Lily Pond by Catherine Jamieson. Unfortunately, because Al deleted his stream on several occasions (only to start a new one), the trail of source images can no longer be traced on many of the collages in the group.

While the hilariousness of this nonsense was addicting, it also served a purpose—for me, at least—in that it gave me an opportunity to develop my Photoshop chops. I previously had used Google's Picasa editor for my photo editing, which was a fine editor for most things I posted, but it was nowhere near as versatile as Photoshop.

Getting back to Phil's photograph, he was one of the handful of people, I think, who made up the core of the collage group, along with me, Al, Steffe, Marya (rhymes with aria), and Jeff. But it wasn't one of his collages that prompted me to write this. It was the "tribute" photographs that followed the one above; the first one by Juliette...

tribute to phil, ©2006 Juliette Melia. All rights reserved.

Then my tribute to Juliette's tribute...

Tribute to Juliette's Tribute to Phil, ©2006 Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

Then Sandra's tribute to my tribute to Juliette's tribute...

paparazzi me, ©2006 Sandra Löv. All rights reserved.

It doesn't look so much like a tribute, I suppose, but it was an inspired tag-on nonethless. What struck me the funniest in all this was Sandra's reference to my contribution in the silly sequence of events.

This is what I prefer when it comes to an online life—not the sharing of memes generated by "Digital Creators" on Facebook, or the animated GIF responses (something which actually appeared on Flickr and ruined many a comment thread with their presence), but connectivity fostered by creativity.

As I was trying find a photograph I could use to wrap this up, I re-discovered a series of photo-merges I'd created using my Icelandic friend Helga's photograph of an Icelandic sheep, Salomon, which I dubbed Salomon's Travels. As I browsed Flickr, I would imagine Salomon making an appearance in others' photographs. Once I found something, the challenge was in processing Salomon's appearance to somewhat match up with the lighting in the photograph I'd chosen to bastardize. In this one I inserted Salomon into a self-portrait by another Icelander, Arnthor Birkisson

Salomon's Dark Side (with apologies to Arnthor Birkisson and Helga Kvam).

A great many of my friends on Facebook and other social media sites are those with whom I communed on Flickr, and we so often pine for those days again because of the uniqueness of the experience, which is sometimes difficult to put into words for people who never used Flickr.

At the end of the year, however, I intend on posting my last photograph on Instagram—assuming that I continue to take at least one photograph a day between now and then—and then commencing anew at Flickr. I don't care if Instagram is the place to be for everyone else. I've decided that it's not for me.

Unfriend

Today I decided to block a friend on Facebook. At this point, I guess I can call him an ex-friend.

We've known each other for as long as I can recall. He and I grew up on the same street about a block and a half away from each other. I can't recall how we came to meet for the first time other than that at that time—the 1960s and into the 1970s—everyone seemed to know everyone else within a couple of blocks of home. He's a year older, went to different elementary and high schools that I did, so we didn't have age or school in common, it was more than likely the overlap of friends.

Regardless, we became pals during high school. He had a 1950s vintage Pontiac or Chevrolet or Buick and I recall him driving us to one of my classmates' party in Genoa, Ohio one weekend, and having to drive home in a pretty thick fog. After high school, we went out drinking together, often to Charlie's Blind Pig near the University of Toledo (which everyone knew as Toledo University—or TU—at the time), or to a pizza joint in north Toledo. In 1973, I believe, he suggested I apply for a job with Commercial Aluminum Cookware in downtown Toledo, where he worked. I was working only part-time at Big Barney Auto Wash, just up the street from home at the time, but it was time to move on, so I applied and got hired.

We worked together at Commercial together for a couple of years-plus (he would retire from there), continued going out drinking together, and regularly golfed together, whether weekly with a bunch of guys from work or just the two of us on the weekend. We go to the driving range fairly often. There was a group of us from our neighbourhood that at one point or another worked for Commercial, also probably at his behest. The bunch of us listened to music a lot together, talked about our new stereo gear, went to concerts and one music festival. All pretty typical stuff that neighbourhood friends do. I became a pretty serious fan of Bob Dylan thanks in large part to having borrowd a copy of his Greatest Hits record from this person, a story for another time.

Pretty much all those relationships fell away, however, when I went off to university in the mid-1970s. I developed new—albeit not particularly long-lasting—relationships while at school; I fell in love a few times (ultimately with the woman I would marry and be divorced by) lived briefly in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, and except for a few years right after getting my degree, I've lived in Michigan and now, California.

Now, I know that I am not the best human being on the planet. I try to be helpful and useful, kind and generous; I endeavour to not purposely hurt people. That said, I know that I have let many people down in my lifetime. One thing that I haven't done, though, is to baldly lie about a friend. But that's what this person did. The lie was work-related.

We were paid hourly to produce cookware, whether spinning pots and pans on lathes, creating baking pans on presses, stamping aluminum with the company name and product number... just a few of the myriad tasks that went on at the factory. I probably spent most of my time trimming the burrs from the edges of saucepan covers. If you worked forty hours a week, you were paid a base wage, but if you worked forty-eight hours a week, the hourly wage went up. I can't recall the specifics, but it was a pretty significant increase from the forty-hour rate to the bonus rate. Our usual starting time was 6:00 a.m., and each day, we would punch in at that time and punch out at 5:00, with an hour lunch usually at noon. I don't recall anyone who didn't opt for the forty-eight- to fifty-hour week. We were given six or seven minutes grace on our clock-in, meaning that if you punched in outside of that grace period, say at 6:08, you were docked an hour. There were many times that coming in late would have meant losing my bonus pay for the week, so I'd call in sick instead. Everyone did this.

One morning, the floor supervisor, Bill, called me into his office. I liked Bill for the most part. He was a golfer and part of the golfing group I mentioned, he played euchre with us during lunch—smoked like a fiend—but he could be a son-of-a-bitch when he put his mind to it, and on this morning, it had come to his attention that someone was punching in other employees' time cards so that they wouldn't get docked, and that somebody had accused me of doing it. I denied doing it, of course, because it hadn't been me. When I asked who had accused me, he told me my, uh, friend had accused me. When, of course, he had been the miscreant.

At the time, I completely severed ties with him. I didn't speak to him for at least a year, despite that I saw him five days a week at work. I can't recall why I lifted my year-long silent treatment, but I did, and things basically went back to normal. I think that the rest of the employees saw us as a Laurel and Hardy or some such inseparable duo since we hung out so much together during and after work hours. We pulled practical jokes together. But the lie should have been a warning.

I missed another sign I probably should have seen at the time. One night, we drove to Bowling Green, Ohio (about twenty miles south of Toledo and where I would eventually go to university) to go to the bars. We must not have stayed too long because on the way back home, President Richard Nixon was giving an address to the nation, which we listened to on the radio. I despised Nixon, who would have been embroiled in the Watergate scandal the night of our little drinking sojourn. I recall mocking almost every single word that came out of his mouth because I knew to the depth of my being that he was a nasty, lying son-of-a-bitch. I was told to shut up. It didn't hit me until recently that he had to have been a Nixon fan, too.

Fast forward to 2015: I helped to organize a reunion at my elementary school. Originally, we had planned it to be just our 8th Grade class, but other classes caught wind of it and wanted to attend. We decided to make it an all-inclusive reunion, allowing anyone who had gone to school at Good Shepherd to come, and almost five hundred people showed up. As did my, uh, friend, who took photographs during the event, which was great because the niece of one of the organizers, who had volunteered, must have screwed something up because I didn't see a single picture she'd taken. As one of the organizers, I allowed him to attend even though he didn't attend our school. But since he lived right across the street, knew so many of the attendees, and had played hockey for years with one of the other organizers, I said OK. It was great to get reacquainted after so many years and to meet his wife. We had already connected on Facebook, but hadn't engaged with each other all that much. We spoke on the phone at length later that year and I learned he'd nearly died due to issues with his heart—the physical one.

Fast forward again to 2024, an election year: I should not have been surprised to find that that he's a Trump supporter. I have family members that are Trump supporters, so it's not like I live in a totally protective political bubble. I guess I was surprised by the vile, ugly, mean, viscious, disgusting, untruthful crap that he would share about Kamala Harris not only to his page, but as comments on my page. I deleted them, of course, just as he deleted my fact-based reminders that he supported a lying, cheating, convicted fraudster, adjudicated rapist, and seditionist. A couple of weeks ago, I changed my share settings so that he couldn't see my new posts, particularly if they had anything to do with the election.

His ugliness didn't end, of course, on election day. Something he shared on his page popped up for me to see (to be clear, this was not something he posted to my page) and I began to question why I bothered staying connected to someone so hateful and hurtful who supported someone so hateful, hurtful, and self-serving who was going to yet again be the most powerful person in the world, who had vowed to hurt people for no reason other than that he could. After a few days of thinking about it, I unfriended him on Facebook. I didn't block him, though. I saw that he "followed" me, which meant that he could comment or Like or see some of what I had previously posted, including a photo I had taken of Kamala Harris when she was running for the Senate in 2016 because he had once commented on that. He was not one to comment very often anyway, so I thought I could just quietly disappear from his feed.

Today, though, he commented on the photo of Harris again. I assume he discovered I'd unfriended him, because it was a nasty comment about me and my choice to live in San Francisco. I didn't even read the whole thing before deleting it, to be honest. I should have done a screencap of it to include here but I decided to get rid of the ugliness before anyone else had to see it. I recall he used the word sissy (or sissified) and something I think was supposed to suggest that I was gay, either because he believes it or that I'd be hurt by it. And it was then I decided that yeah, I'd made the right decision to unfriend him.

And then I blocked him.

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This Old Sweater

Moi, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

My friend Greg wrote about an old shirt that he owns, and since it's my hope to write here on a daily basis (at least for a little while), the topic inspired me as I, too, have an article of clothing that I have been wearing for a long time, and which still brings a certain comfort to me.

My story probably isn't half as interesting as Greg's, but in February of 2005, I attended the International Folk Alliance conference in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I was booking a folk music concert series at the time, as well as coördinating the music for the now-defunct Great Lakes Folk Festival. It might have been my first time out of the country as an adult, now that I think about it, as the only time I recall being in Canada previous to that was on a family vacation as a kid.

Since it was February in Montréal, I naturally brought warm clothes with me because I expected to wander from the hotel while I was there. I had joined Flickr the previous September (I can't believe it's been over twenty years now!) and had become part of a thriving community of people sharing photographs and stories and their senses of humour and so many aspects of their lives. No social media site can match that today—not Facebook, not Instagram, not the hellscape once known as Twitter. Flickr was the be all, end all of social media.

But I digress...

I was staying at the Hyatt Regency, just a short walk from Old Montréal, so I planned to get to the oldest part of the then three-hundred-sixty-three-year-old city to take photographs to share on Flickr. I didn't have a really heavy coat at the time, despite that I lived in Michigan, but layers would keep me warm. One of the layers was this sweatshirt.

Trois, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Odds are you haven't been to a Folk Alliance conference before, but during the day, there are break-out sessions about various aspects of the music business aimed at both musicians and bookers/producers, along with official showcases by musicians produced by the Folk Alliance. Musicians also hold "guerrilla" showcases, typically in their bedrooms or in suites if they happen to have garnered sponsorship. I've not been to a conference in quite some time, but the guerrilla sets were discouraged while the official showcases were going on so as not to splinter the audience during that block of time.

So, once the offical showcases had ended late in the evening, the unofficial showcases would run until almost all hours of the night. Since the hotel was pretty much nothing but conference goers, it didn't tend to create a problem. Also, there were "non-music" floors for people who had more interest in sleeping than attending these mini-concerts. Perhaps the biggest problem was—as a booker wanting to check out specific musicians—being able to get from one room to another in short periods of time, especially if it meant going from one floor to another when everyone else was trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Which is what leads me to the sweater. You know... the one in the photograph at the top of this page?

I can't recall the specific circumstances of the night in question, but it's all too likely that I had returned to the hotel either from a walk or from having dinner with several friends, and after dropping off my coat in my room, I went about my magical mystery tour wearing the XXL sweater, and somewhere along the way, I got too warm wearing it so I took it off and carried it around with me from showcase to showcase. I most certainly had a conference tote bag with me, but as it was no doubt filled with CDs and press kits, the sweatshirt was either tucked under my arm or—more likely—tied around my waist so that I wouldn't have to carry it under my arm, and somewhere along the way, either in a hotel room or hallway or elevator, I dropped it. When I noticed it, I backtracked a bit in hopes of recovering it but to no avail.

So, on my flight out, knowing that the airplane cabin would be cold (they're always cold!), I bought a new sweater at an airport gift shop, and while it no doubt was expensive to some degree, I have certainly gotten my money's worth out of it over the course of the last nearly twenty years. It has also made an appearance in many of the self-portraits I've posted at Flickr since that time, although sometimes not always an obvious component of the photographs. It has traveled to Paris, Oslo, Prince Edward Island, and the United Kingdom as well as many places throughout the United States in twenty years. In fact, one totally unexpected benefit of wearing the sweater in Paris in 2005, when Bush was President, was that people guessed that I was from Canada. That was nice.

Unlike Greg's shirt, my sweater hasn't developed any holes. The zipper is still intact, but the elastic at the ends of the sleeves has been stretched out from pulling the sleeves up to my elbows too many times. The green in the fabric has also faded a fair amount. Like Greg, I put it on during the cold months while I'm indoors to help against the chill in the air (especially since our steam heat seems to work only when it's warm outside), and lately, unike Greg, I've even been wearing it outdoors.

History. Comfort.

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My Last Day In Paris, Part Two

or Not My Last Day In Paris, Part Two

Sumei à l'Hôtel du Nord ©2024 Patrick T. Power

It's best to read Part One first.

After parting with Sumei, a light rain began to fall in the city as I made my way to Le Dock. Based on the photos I took, I rode the métro to a stop near the Louvre, probably Concorde, then walked from there. Amongst my favourite things to do in Paris (or, really, anywhere, I guess) is to photograph the reflections in the wet pavement. And so it was that I noticed the reflections of the red illuminated awnings of the entrances at the Ritz Paris in Place Vendôme.

Ritz Paris, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Everything so far had gone swimmingly, and I took to heart the first three letters of the name of a shoe store, I think, or maybe one that sold clothes in general. La joie. Joy.

La joie, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I must have gotten something to eat at around this time as I didn't take another photograph for well over an hour, and didn't get to Le Dock for another hour after that. While I recall so much about the day and the trip, I'm at a loss as to the space of time between Place Vendôme and Le Dock.

Sebastien at the bar, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Ten or twelve of my friends made it out that night, a Tuesday, as well as a couple I think I'd never met before, and borrowing a mobile, I called one more—Phil—to encourage him to show up. It turned out that it was a good thing he did.

Aru, Me, Pierre, and Audrey, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

A native of Switzerland, Phil had been living in Paris for some time. He's a musician and founded/runs a music school. When my original lodging plans hit a snag, he let me stay at his place for two or three nights. This is important to note because Phil's ex-girlfriend from Sweden, Linn, was also staying with him for a spell as she was in Paris for a medical appointment. She and I had talked at some point and we discovered that we were scheduled to fly out on the same day.

With only a couple of exceptions, I probably knew Phil best of all my Flickr friends, so I was hoping to see him before I left. At around 11:30 PM he made it. Almost immediately, he said, "I wasn't going to come because you were supposed to leave today." I said, "No, I leave tomorrow." He said, "No, you were supposed to leave today, because I took Linn to the airport this morning, and you were supposed to leave on the same day she did." Of course, he was right, but as I had my backpack with me which held my itinerary, I got it out to check it.

Un vol raté, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

With that revelation, of course, there was really nothing I could do except carry on with the fun. Figuring out what to do to get home would have to wait until morning. Which, of course, it did.

Mes amis, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

But all of a sudden, it occurred to me that had I made my 1:55 PM flight, I would be landing in Detroit at 5:05 PM, which pretty much was what time it was in Detroit at that very moment. My friend Melissa had offered to pick me up at Detroit Metro, which meant that she might very well be sitting in her car wondering where the hell I was. I borrowed Phil's phone and called her. As I think of this now, I was incredibly lucky that in November of 2005 both she and Phil had mobile phones, because I wouldn't get one for another five years. Anyway, she was just about to arrive at the terminal when I reached her, and being the kind, sweet human being that she is shrugged it off as no problem. (I think. I hope.) While it was a pretty big inconvenience to have wasted four hours of her time (in rush-hour traffic, no less), it could have been SO much worse had I not remembered this. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur to me now, and not because I was drunk (I wasn't). I went back to my hosts' apartment not knowing what I was going to do. I hoped, of course, that Northwest Airlines would work with me to get me on another flight, but I would soon learn a lesson about airlines and missed flights. (Long after my trip, I was curious about where I was at the time my flight was taking off, so I looked through my photographs and checked their time stamps. I was with Sumei at Hôtel du Nord)

The following morning, Catherine, with some assistance from her brother Julien helped me to book a flight home. At the time, it was considerably cheaper to book round-trip—versus one-way—tickets, so that's what we did, but in order to keep the price down, we went with a departure date that would mean nine more days in Paris. In may ways, those last nine days were the best days of the trip.

Part One

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My Last Day In Paris, Part One

or Not My Last Day In Paris

Canal Saint-Martin, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Probably anyone who knows me even a little knows that I love Paris. Thanks to the generosity of several Parisians, I made my first trip there in November of 2005. I have many stories to tell from that time, but because someone posted something to Facebook this morning that reminded me of something that occurred nineteen years ago yesterday, I thought I would write about that day.

First, I have to preface by saying that my trip was to last two weeks, from 1 November (when the plane left Detroit) to 15 November. At some point during that last week, I decided to make a trip to Madrid, Spain to visit another friend whom I'd met on Flickr. When I booked that flight, my plan was to go to Madrid for three days and two nights, return to Paris, take the whole next day to wander the city one more time, then leave for home the following day.

That was the plan anyway.

Everything actually went pretty smoothly, and on that last full day, I contacted a few of my friends and recommended we get together one last time at Le Dock, a now-defunct bar not too far from L'Opéra Garnier. One of our Flickr pals, Phillipe, was a bartender there, and the place was sort of the unofficial Flickr watering hole.

So, that morning, between 9:00 and 10:00, I caught line 1 at the Place Blanche métro station, which was just across the street from where I was staying, and headed to Place Saint-Michel. The trip required changing trains at Gare de L'Est (made famous in the film Amélie), and as I waited for my connection to arrive, I decided to sit on the platform for a while and people watch. In the mornings, as you might imagine, trains were packed with commuters, and as I watched them load and unload every few minutes, I imagined a series of photographs taken over several hours from the spot I was sitting, recording what each train looked like as the doors closed before departing. While I waited, a young woman rushing to get onto a train, unwittingly dropped her scarf. I hurriedly picked it up and handed it to her just inside the door, in time for the doors to close. I took but three frames while I waited at Gare de L'Est, all of the reflection in a stairwell.

À Gare de L'Est, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Once at Saint-Michel, I walked around the area looking for souvenirs for my kids (I am SO BAD at buying gifts for people), took a few pictures at the fountain at Saint-Michel as well as along the Seine, then walked over to explore around Cathédrale Notre-Dame, then Hôtel de Ville before catching another train at the Hôtel de Ville métro stop. I had arranged to meet a friend in the Belleville section of town, so I got off at République station. My route took me past Canal Saint-Martin—also made famous in Amélie—along the way, so I stopped to take a few pictures. The panorama at the top of this post was taken there. Along Boulevard de la Villette, I came upon this woman in a beautiful coat.

Sur Boulevard de la Villette, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I met my friend Sumei, but not before getting a photograph of part of the façade of Palais des Glaces, a theatre on Rue de Faubourg du Temple.

Palais des Glaces, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Sumei and I headed back to Canal Saint-Martin and we took a bunch of pictures there, me with my Nikon CoolPix 8800 (a rather glorified point-and-shoot) and she with her dSLR, a Nikon D70s.

Passerelle des Douanes (Prisma conversion), ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Sumei is another of the people I met via Flickr, and, in fact, I think this was our first in-person meeting. We stopped to have a coffee at Brasserie de l'Hôtel du Nord on Quai de Jemmapes, which runs along the east side of the canal. Hôtel du Nord is famous as the setting for the eponymous 1938 film. After coffee, Sumei had a little business to tend to. She worked for real estate company at the time, and she had to get a signature on a lease or a deed or something in the La Chappelle neighbourhood, so I accompanied her. Afterwards, we visited Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle (Saint Bernard Church of La Chapelle), which was built from 1858 to 1861. I have a thing for religious iconography, despite my atheist ways, so we spent about thirty minutes there before she had to get on her way home in the south of the city.

Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Part Two

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Zaho de Sagazan

or Fanboy

Zaho De Sagazan, Paléo Festival Nyon 2023. ©Paléo/Anne Colliard

Next month, I'll be going to my first concert in several months, and only the second since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Anyone who knows me knows that music and concert-going has been a major part of my life for the last thirty years or so. Not just because music has always meant so much to me—that friend when I didn't have one—but because it was also my job for a long time, booking a thirty-a-year concert series for almost ten years, and then a traditional arts festival for seventeen, with a couple of years in which I did both. I also managed an artist's first year or more as she began her career.

As a booker, I often went to shows to check out talent, but one of the perks of the job was being able to call up an agent to get comped into a show just because I wanted to see someone for my own enjoyment.

After I was rather unceremoniously dumped from the festival job, my interest in music took a big spike. As noted above, the pandemic also helped [sic] in that regard, I suppose, but mainly, there was a certain loss in joy as it pertained to live music. Hell, I don't listen to music as much around the apartment anymore, something I never would have foreseen twenty years ago. And on top of that, the 2016 election sucked so much joy out of life.

But a few months ago, this video popped up as a reel on my Instagram feed, likely because I follow a number of French language accounts. The singer's emotion hooked me immediately; as did the melody; as did the words. The experience was something akin to discovering Dar Williams almost thirty years ago. I had to find out more about this person, this Zaho de Sagazan.

The song she sings in the video is "La symphonie des éclairs" or "Symphony of the Lightning," and for days, I listened to it over and over and over again while on my way to jobs or while out walking. Because I have so desperately wanted to understand French—I've been trying to learn it for going on twenty years now—I listened hard to the words to try to make sense of them without the aid of a translator. Indeed I understood most of them and got the gist of the song, thanks probably to its slow-ish pace and the fact that she pronounces almost everything clearly (to my failing ears). It moved me in a way that I can't explain. Maybe it's because she considers herself to be a hypersensitive which resonates with me to a degree?

I looked for live versions of it in addition to that reel clip. I found this one, a performance at Les Victoires de la Musique, which appears to be France's equivalent to the Grammy Awards. I was knocked out by her presence, her movements (she took eight years of dance), her ease with having a camera in her face as she performed, her intensity. That said, the musicians behind her bewildered me somewhat. I found it interesting that they had their backs to the audience, and—because I'm not hip to electronic music—I had no real clue as to what they were doing with those boxes. I spoke with a musician friend of mine in Paris about it and he told me that the boxes were synthesizers. Such is modern music, I guess.

I was so excited by this discovery that I shared the Les Victoires video with a few friends, but unsurprisingly, I suppose, it didn't have the same impact on them because... French. I soon learned that Zaho's recording had been out since 2023, and that she had won five awards at Les Victoires. She most definitely was not une chanteuse inconnue in France.

All of her songs are not of the variety of 'Symphonie.' She is indeed a child of her time, so dance-techno is a big part of her shows from what I've seen on YouTube. I think back on my trip to Paris in the fall of 2007 when I attended the massive annual Techno Parade and the—I'll say it—unbearable volume that ripped through my body, no doubt damaging my ears, makes me wonder what I'm going to experience next month. I'll definitely be wearing ear plugs during certain segments of the show. (I'm still pondering whether or not to wear a mask, leaning towards yes.)

When I initially looked her up, I found this video in which she meets Tom O'Dell, an English pop star whose name sort of rings a bell, but I can't really say I'd heard of him. There is so much about their ideas about music and being musicians that resonates deeply with me. Perhaps the one thing that really hit home with me was when she said, "What I find a little crazy about Tom's music is that it can make us sad or comfort us and it's the same person that's making you sad and comforting you at the same time." In fact, lyrics from the bridge of "La symphonie des éclairs" translate to: "I will make people dance to the rhythm of my tears | The torment of my songs will come to warm hearts, to warm my heart." From that same meeting, there is a video of the two of them performing the song together at the piano, and her expressions throughout are as touching as their performance. Her joy at singing with her mentor is quite moving.

I have listened to her record dozens of times already, and every now and then a new video of her performing "La symphonie des éclairs" pops up, and it's clear to me that the song is going to be performed for a long time, and not only by her. Its message is universal. I hope she never tires of singing it. At the moment, it seems as though she's entirely thrilled to have her audiences sing with her, so much so that she now extends the song to include them.

But it doesn't end with that song for me. Zaho was selected to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Greta Gerwig had been named as president of the festival's jury and in her honour, Zaho, who speaks little English, sang David Bowie's "Modern Love". Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me about that performance was how she made performing at one of France's most important events all look so easy... at twenty-three years old.

When the Summer Olympics kicked off in Paris earlier this year, I was surprised (and frankly, a little put off) to find that Canadian Céline Dion—and not a native-born French singer—had been selected to perform at the opening ceremonies. But I was later delighted to find that Zaho would open the closing ceremonies with a performance of "Sous le ciel de Paris" (Under The Paris Sky), made famous by possibly the most renowned French singer, Edith Piaf.

Recently, Zaho released a revised version of her record to include eight new songs, one of which was co-written and performed with none other than Tom O'Dell. (It's a little cheesy, but also moving in its own way.) At first, I thought the additional tracks would alter the feel of the record, but no. I was concerned, too, that she'd change the sequencing, but was pleased to find she'd merely tacked them on at the end.

I mentioned earlier that she seems so completely at ease in front of the camera, whether on French TV or—as with the Olympics—in front of the entire world, but social media was coming of age at the same time she was—she was 10 when the iPhone was born (Twitter, too, I think)—so having a cameraphone in her face probably has been second nature with her for most of her life. One of my favourite video moments occurs during a performance of "Aspiration" on C à vous, a French television show hosted by Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine (who I can tell LOVES Zaho). The moment comes at about 2:05 in the video when she approaches co-host Patrick Cohen and makes a face at him.

I realize that this is quite the long post in praise of a musician that most—if not all—of my handful of readers will shrug their shoulders about, but the last ten years in this country have been nothing short of hell. I'm expecting that the next twenty—if I even live that long—will be considerably worse. So I'm glad to be able to rave about one thing that brings joy into my life.

I plan to post photos and/or videos from the concert next month.

Fanboy, Part II: Seeing Zaho

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Change Is Good

or How did I get here?

Today, for the first time since my divorce in 1996, I wished my ex-wife a happy birthday. By text, but still.

It's weird, I guess that that has been the case, but divorce is a pretty shitty experience to go through, regardless of the fifty percent that I contributed to the shittiness of the relationship, which I didn't recognize as shitty at the time because I didn't really give it that much thought.

Maybe shitty isn't really the word for it—for her, yeah, since she's the one who filed—at least I didn't see it that way. I mean I see now what a shitty husband I was—in ways that didn't involve cheating, physical or verbal abuse, getting drunk every night, neglecting the kids... you know the typical metrics by which a shitty marriage is determined as such. No, it was my lack of emotional presence; it was my all-consuming desire to not fail at the job I was failing at that kept me away from home more hours than I care to admit. I went in early, came home late, and often went in late at night for a couple more hours. I was a supervisor and I sucked at supervising, so I did a shitload of my staff's work because for the most part, they didn't care one way or the other if it got done. Our clients' work (often research scientists) required timely delivery. Let me add here, though, that it wasn't all of the people who worked for me.

To be fair, I never instilled in my staff the importance of meeting deadlines. But in my own defense, at what point was that my responsibility? How do thirty-year-old people not get that when something is scheduled to be done by a certain time, you plan your day around that? It was something I could never wrap my head around because every job I'd had in photography/graphics/advertising had been very team-oriented. Everyone understood what had to be done and did it. Anyway, that was where my head was at for the last almost-eleven years of my marriage.

You'd think, of course, that my work would be a subject for discussion between us, but no, my mind set was "why should I burden her with this after her long day with the kids?" It was cyclical in that way, I suppose, since the more I clung onto that rationale for not talking about my problems, the more it became a problem that I wasn't talking about it.

I'm typically not the type to blame his parents for the way I acted within my marriage, but neither can I ignore the fact that I never heard my parents discuss stuff, whether marriage-related or really anything. There probably is a certain amount of modeling from our parents that comes into play. I failed to rise above it, though. Not long after my divorce, after I'd moved into my apartment, I was on the phone with my mom. My older brother had left his wife after twenty-five years of marriage, and my younger brother had been kicked out of his house by his wife because she'd found out he'd been screwing around with someone. In possibly the only time Mom had displayed vulnerability in the years I'd known her, she said something to the effect of, "I should have shown more love to you kids." It was a bit of a shocker really, because as best as I can recall she had never once said, "I love you" to any of us. (Years later, she did.) Mom didn't kiss us before bedtime... I don't recall getting hugs from her. Anyway, my response to her was something like "Mom, you did the best you could. We're (referring to me and my brothers) all adults and we have to live with the decisions we've made in our lives."

It probably didn't help alleviate her Catholic-fed guilt much, but it most certainly was the truth.

It's kind of weird how the thought of wishing my ex-wife happy birthday brought all this out, but it just goes to show how so much of what we do and say and don't do and don't say are related.

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Old Is New

I'm not including a photo with this post, although I should have looked for something just to dress it up a bit, but all of a sudden, after yesterday's post, I have this urge to write stuff here on this old blog (maybe I should change the name again to This Old Blog?) while letting go of my Medium and Substack pages. No one reads anything I write anyway, so what's the difference where I write?

Just now, I went to my Soundcloud page and deleted that account. I hope I have copies of the songs on a drive somewhere. I've just been in this frame of mind lately to start reducing my internet presence. I've already begun to unsubscribe to many of the marketing emails I get—not that I actually ever wanted to receive them in the first place—since I tend to delete them without looking at them anyway. I can't believe how fucking many I get! On many, I've gone to the website of origin and deleted my account.It suckes that they still have my email to be shared and or stolen by others, but I do feel it helps. A little.

I've got a couple of pages at Facebook... one is my photography page, and another is dedicated to the essays and "Thoughts at Large" of Sydney J. Harris, possibly the person who is most responsible for my interest in writing in the first place. I've let that page go a long time without updates, but maybe if I can get myself into some kind of habit, I can maintain it because I really think more people should know about him and the way he thinks, er... thought. Thanks to Google Lens, it's easier to transcribe his writing, which is something that has been a time suck for me, so perhaps I can systematically attack his essays and not—as I have done in the past—select something that is appropriate to the events of the day, week, or month.

I think I feel a plan coming along.

Mark Zuckerberg still sucks, though.

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Stagnancy, Change, Renewal

Union Station, Portland ©2024 Patrick T. Power.

This might be only a temporary thing, but I'm returning to my original blog to write this. Memories from over twenty years ago surfaced and it led me back here. I was surprised to find though, that my earliest post was from 2000, and that it was the only post from that year. From the tone of it, one might think that there had been previous posts, but apparently not. Anyway, in addition to the three blogs related to my parents' history I maintain, I've been posting personal stuff at Medium and Substack. I guess I can't help hopping on the next-best-thing bandwagon.

The photograph I've included here was taken on the 22nd of March 2023. I was taking my son back to Michigan via Amtrak and due to having missed our connecting train in Portland the previous evening by about twenty minutes, Amtrak put us up for the night. Our train for Chicago didn't leave until late afternoon of the 22nd, so I took a stroll in the morning to take some photographs. Union Station is one of the more beautiful train stations I've seen in the country, so I spent a fair amount of time photographing it inside and out.

I have been posting photographs at Instagram for quite some time now. I was enthralled with it at first, before Facebook purchased it. I rather liked the Hipstamatic-created images that many people were posting, and I, not having an iPhone (for which Hipstamatic was created), was stuck with lesser Hipstamatic-ish applications. Still, I had fun with it, and I enjoyed what others were posting. The Facebook/Meta takeover ruined it, of course. I don't know how much Facebook/Meta actually had to do with what Instagram became— namely THE place that other photographers posted their professional portfolios (versus or in addition to, I suppose, their own websites), where celebrities shared their publicity imagery, and where regular people tried to gain massive popularity—but the vibe most definitely changed for me. It seemed as if Instagram had merely become the place to be discovered.

Of course, that's not me. It's not my mindset. I just wanted to post photographs of the things throughout the course of my days, usually taken during my daily walks around the city. For me, it was about sharing. For the last five years, I think, I've taken and posted at least one photograph a day on Instagram, with perhaps a day or two that I somehow missed in that span. I used to tag my photos thinking, OK, yeah, maybe it might lead to getting more eyeballs and therefore more work opportunities if those same eyeballs decided to check out my website, but nah... it mostly led to spammers posting their profile links. I have tagged my projects, such as my Prisma-a-day project in 2020, mostly as a way of finding things for later reference, but I've even cut that out this year.

During my time on Instagram, I've allowed my Flickr photostream (do people still refer to them as photostreams?) to stagnate, despite that I pay for my Pro Flickr account. Last year, I tried to maintain the photo-a-day thing at both Instagram and Flickr, but couldn't keep up. As I mentioned, the above photograph was taken on 22 March, so that means that I made it eighty-one days into the year—not even three full months!

At some point in the last few months, though, as I've scrolled through Instagram, I've decided that I no longer want to post or spend much time there. I've not decided yet if I won't ever post there again, but I'm of a mind as I type this that I won't. Just now, though, scrolling through my feed, I'm pleased with the photographs and the way that they look as a whole. I think that they come together pretty nicely. I like that I stuck with the square format from day one (which was the only way to post in the early days); I like that I did a whole year of black-and-white photographs; I like that I did a whole year—time-consuming though it was—of creating Prisma-created images. Now, though, I want to have as little to do with that asshole Zuckerberg as possible. Yes, I'll maintain my Facebook account, mainly for the groups that I maintain there, but also for the connection it provides with a sizeable number of friends.

Despite that it's not and never will be what it once it once was, I'm heading back to Flickr to share my photographs. I might try to catch up my 2023 and 2024 one-a-day projects between now and the end of this year, but because of my change of phones a couple of times and losing track of where I've archived everything (thanks to a couple of major moves of files in the last couple of years), it could take forever.

I'm not sure what I'll do with regard to my blogging. It seems counterproductive to have three platforms for my personal writing. Maybe I'll take all of the essays from the other sites and re-post them here. I'd already re-posted a number of Facebook Notes (remember those?) at Medium... perhaps it won't be so difficult to re-post them yet another time.

My interest in writing has changed immensely since I christened this blog. So much of my time and energy was taken up wasted with writing about the presidency of George W. Bush. In fact, not too long ago, I spent a day or two deleting many of my political posts. I hope to make time for more of that. I've similarly spent wasted a lot of time screaming into the void on Twitter for the last ten years or more, ruining what was originally a wonderful experience. I deactivated that account recently and have moved to Bluesky, which has a similar vibe to early Twitter, but I don't want to repeat the Twitter experience there, especially having come to the realization that what I have to say isn't really all that important to anyone but myself. So I might end up backing away from that place as a matter of maintaining my mental health.

I've also changed the title of this blog since Voice Of Power was somewhat of a reference to the power of thought and communication in the political blogosphere (a term I've not heard in a while, come to think of it) while coincincidentally being a play on my name. It remains a play on my name but without the pretention.

So, as the saying goes, onward and upward. Or maybe in my case, just onward.

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Dyadic Encounter

Patty Haffner, Bowling Green State University Student Union, circa 1979

It's an underexposed photograph, taken with the very first 35mm camera I ever owned, a Nikkormat FTN that I'd bought from my roommate, Lou Perlaky, who had gotten it from his father. I still have the camera; it still has Lou's dad's Social Security number etched into the baseplate. I had lots to learn about photography at that time, and because I relied on the in-camera light meter, which in this case was fooled by all the light coming through the windows in the background, I underexposed the film.

Recently, I have been going through the thousands of photographs I've uploaded to Google Photos over the last fifteen years or so. At the beginning, there was no limit to the number of photos one could upload, but that has changed, and as my available storage space nears its 15GB limit, I've been deleting work photos that I had archived. Along the way, I've come across photos I'd somewhat forgotten about, including those which I scanned from my old negatives. The above is one such photo, and my mind drifted back to those halcyon days.

I met Patty Haffner (I think she spelled it Patti at the time) at Bowling Green State University sometime in the spring of 1977. She was a dorm mate of my then-girlfriend Lisa Salisbury, whom I'd met the previous winter in a Popular Culture class. Because it was spring, there was a lot of sunbathing going on after classes, so I met many of Lisa's Ashley Hall friends as we all soaked in rays at the southwest corner of Kreischer Quadrangle.

Lisa and I stopped seeing each other in the fall when it became clear to me that I was her on-the-side guy, but I remained in touch with a few of her friends. Before the break-up, in fact, I went to see Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger with Karen Klemencic at Blossom, an outdoor concert venue near Akron, Ohio. Karen lived in Mentor, to the east of Cleveland, which was sort of near Blossom, so I asked her to accompany me. (Now that I think about it, I think she and Patty were dorm mates). I went to see Jackson Browne (and The Section) at Pine Knob, near Detroit, with Renaee Crippen, another friend of Lisa's who lived somewhat near me in Perrysburg.

But I digress…

Patty was somewhat… mousey, I guess, is the term.* She was small-ish in stature, had a quiet-ish voice, and an almost nervous demeanor. A great giggle. At the time we met, her hair was mid-back long, but — as the photo shows — she had it cut shorter as she neared graduation. (I recall thinking, "NOOOOO!" at the time.) She also was a smoker, which was annoying and kind of heartbreaking, and I have no doubt that I chided her about it from time to time. But I was still drawn to her.

During the winter quarter of 1979, I took Speech 102, a required course for my major in Visual Communications Technology. One of our assignments was to engage in two dyadic encounters, and then write a paper on our experiences. Patty was one of the two people I'd asked to participate, the other being a woman I'd just met in a photography class. (I'm pretty sure that the assignment required meeting with one stranger and someone with whom we were familiar.) As a matter of refreshing my memory about the assignment — as well as to see what I'd written about my encounter with Patty — I dug up the paper this morning.

The paper got a B, and deservedly so. A lot of my observations were not as developed as they could have been. This many years later, I find myself critiquing my own shortcomings as a writer, and completely agreeing with my instructor's comments that I appeared "to be ‘hiding' personal feelings and more in-depth analysis."

(Also, I have never again used the word expurgation.)

I wish I'd saved the ten or so questions, or prompts, that comprised the exercise (apparently, I don't save everything!) as it would be nice to have a clearer idea of the assignment. On one of the pages, though (see photo), I made note of one of the prompts:

"I think you should know…"

Reading this for the first time in years, I was somewhat surprised that I'd told Patty of my "deep, deep feelings for her." I was quite fond of her, but I don't recall the "deep, deep" part. It surprised me, too, that — as I wrote in the prelude — she had "come to be my closest friend in recent weeks." I tend to have a pretty good memory with regard to my relationships with certain people, so I guess that in the span of almost forty-five years, I've forgotten most of the details that made up our relationship. I can say with almost a hundred percent certainty, however, that there were no hours-long phone conversations, no poems of yearning, no clumsy attempts to kiss her. There was never an ‘I love you as a friend but…' conversation. Maybe I didn't really want to know the truth — that she wasn't interested — so I let it lie. Maybe I was sincere when I said that I didn't want my feelings to "get in the way of our friendship." Maybe that was all just pretend to avoid an eventual broken heart.

But this:

"It was at this time she felt perhaps the same way as I, or that she was willing to discuss so much more…

Which is not to suggest that she actually had similar feelings, but perhaps that the door was slightly open to something. She had suggested a second meeting to talk about things she said she hadn't adequately discussed, but I refused. So…? That I dismissed a follow-up meeting is another surprise to me as — considering what I'd revealed to her — I think I would have jumped at the chance to see her again. So, now, just as my instructor wrote in her notes, "I don't understand, there seems to be something underlying this."

She had been in a relationship when I met her, so that might have been part of my hesitance. That I had romantic notions suggests to me that her relationship was a little shaky, but I don't recall ever talking with her about it at any length. I don't recall having ever met her boyfriend, although he might have shown up at an event that our little circle had attended, and I didn't know much about him other than that he was a teacher. (There actually is more that I won't get into.) It might have been one of those nebulous (to me, at least) on-again-off-again things in which she had expressed doubts about him but that they weren't strong enough to end it.

Moving on from the wouldacouldashouldas…

The most vivid memory I have of Patty and of being in her company (besides the above frozen-in-time photograph) is of an evening she came to my apartment in probably February or early March of 1979. (That my paper is dated 21 January bears that out somewhat.) I don't recall the occasion. We probably drank some wine. If we had dinner, it was likely pizza. We sat on the floor, our backs against the front of the couch, with music playing as we talked. I recall turning all the lights off specifically so that we could listen in the dark to Graham Nash's haunting "Cathedral" on the Crosby, Stills & Nash record, CSN. (There are some songs that require total darkness, Tom Waits' "Putnam County" is another.)

It very possibly was the last time I saw her. I visited her once in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, but I think that was two years earlier, while on my way to or from the aforementioned Arlo Guthrie show. Since I didn't take photos as obsessively back then (yay, cellphones!), I don't have any record of my day-to-day activities. I scribbled occasional thoughts and mostly lame poetry into a blank book, but it wasn't anything resembling a journal. I found an entry today that might have had something to do with her as it was addressed, "Dear friend," but I can't say for sure.

Thanks to a Newspapers.com search I found that she'd gotten her marriage license the last week of March 1979, and a search at Ancestry revealed her marriage date as 7 April. Eventually, she moved to the Houston, Texas area, where she taught, had two daughters, got divorced, and then remarried. I've gathered that she was a step-mom, too. I sent her the photo via Facebook shortly after I had scanned it, but she didn't respond. I also sent her a note not long after Lisa Salisbury died since I figured she wouldn't have known. Again, nothing.

So, today, when I came across the photo again, I opened Messenger to look up when it was that I sent it to her — nine years ago! My second note, about Lisa, was dated February of 2016. When I clicked through to her Facebook page to see if there were any recent updates, I found that it had become a memorial page. Patty had died. Based on comments her daughter made on a photo, she died in the spring of 2017. Her last public post was on 21 May of that year — a picture of her granddaughter. I couldn't find an obituary for her anywhere. Scrolling through her Facebook posts, I found she had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, and had other health issues, but a few of the photos she posted of herself suggest she might also have had cancer. Which makes me think of all the cigarettes she smoked.

In addition to the picture of Patty, I took a "still life" photograph that day of her cigarette butts in an ashtray, her coffee cup, her mini-stack of books (and what looks to be a pack of cigarettes), and her legal pad. I can only make out "Computer" and "Data" at the top of the pad, and maybe "March."

Patty’s butts, notes, books, and coffee cup.

Despite all the years of not being in touch, I've long cherished that we were friends at some point in our lives. I often wondered what became of her. Scrolling through her Facebook posts and seeing her daughters' comments, I can only guess that all in all, she had a pretty good post-Bowling Green life. But I'm sad that she's no longer in this world, regardless of whether or not we reconnected. And that's why, I guess, I've spent the better part of a day writing this, and another couple, now, making edits… to grieve a little, I suppose; to memorialize the relationship — whatever it might have been — in some way. Each of us passes in and out of so many people's lives — just as many others pass in and out of ours — that it wouldn't surprise me if Patty barely recognized my name when it showed up on Messenger in 2013, if she ever even saw the messages.

The thing is, regardless of the depth (or lack of depth) of the relationship, she existed in my life as I did in hers. We are forever changed in ways small or grand.

Whatever reason or reasons Patty had for not wanting to reconnect, she's gone now. I hate that. A lot.

Patty, circa 1985

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*After writing this, I looked at the few public photos Patty had on her Facebook page, and they reminded me that when she smiled, her narrow, angular face sort of took the shape of Italian puppet, Topo Gigio, including her slightly buck-y front teeth, so perhaps my description of her as mousey is indeed apt.

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Postscript (23 November 2022): While I was in the process of writing this tribute, I sent a note to one of Patty's daughters via Facebook, along with the photograph of her from 1979. I didn't really know what I expected to gain from that other than maybe thanks for having a photograph of her mom that she'd never seen before — I know that experience so well. Since we weren't connected on Facebook, however, I had no idea if she'd ever see the message much less respond. Today she did, and she clued me in on a few more details about Patty… that she taught Reading and English at various times to grades 8 through 12, that her date of death was 26 August 2017, that her cancer (leukemia) was indeed related to her years of smoking.

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Flickr Binge

Wave — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

I have been on somewhat of a creative tear of late, hence the scarce attention paid here...

Instead of focusing on articulating thoughts with words, I've drifted (constantly drifting!) to my photographic side with an intensity I've probably never known before. I probably will have to begin to settle that a bit for fear of burning it out in some supernova-like blast.

I have been involved in a photographic conversation with another flickr member, helveticaneue, which has fueled the blitz of photos I've been creating. Last week I discovered she had been inspired by a photograph of my fingers, which was quite a nice feeling. Posting these photographs for the world to see is a bit daunting at times, particularly when the talent pool at flickr is overflowing with amazingly gifted photographers — professional or not. That a photo of mine has served to inspire someone else's art is an awesome feeling.

And so began the conversation of photos and words that have been taking up a great deal of my creative energies for the past week. It has been nothing short of stimulating on so many levels. This exercise has been a combination of word association and photography, and the challenge for me has been to create my images by making prominent use of my fingers or hands. (Also, I'm using my Nikon CoolPix 3200 only, which has limited flexibility. So far, however, I've been making the most of it, I think.) The moment I post a photo, a surge of anticipation comes over me—a hope that the photo perfectly matches the word; a hope that the response is a gleefully smiling "well done!" The anticipation as to what I'm going to see next then starts to well up in me, and the whole cycle begins again.

Fingers — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

The interesting thing about it all is that I have also ripped off a series of haiku poems as a means by which I've commented on several of helveticaneue's images. And it hasn't stopped there... I've also begun to write verse in order to comment on other flickr members' photos.

Flickr seems to have become the conduit between me and my muse and I'm loving it.

wave

hands grip lucent skin
passing heat 'fore letting go
its glowing surface

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fingers

fingers sing and glide
they tickle then confound me
I wish for patience

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trace

alabaster-like
her skin reaches to the light
with each pensive breath

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fine

vines on a night walk–
like hairs so fine and tangled
sprawling 'cross his skin

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before

soothing waters close
gently 'round her anxious toes
probing like her heart

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after

golden in repose,
her fingers slip through the veil
guiding her passage

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division

it's not what you see—
it's how your feelings pull you.
all is bright within.

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morning

morning's dim light blinks
its eyes awake
like a lover
smiling
from the other
pillow

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me.

the angle of view
that reveals so much of her
needs so little light

EDIT TO ADD (20 December 2025): I've removed the links to photographs from a number of the above poem titles as the photographs have either been deleted, made private, or the user has deleted his/her account.

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Meeting Penny

Penny, circa July 1980 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

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 took 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'd created them, starting with Barb Morris on 19 December 1994 and ending with retakes 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 do 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 actually doing any portraits on my own 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 my training at 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 cover. 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 working at 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 work 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 taken 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.

Penny, 25 March 1995 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

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

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Paris

Eiffel et Caroussel ©2008 by Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

Friends of ours will be getting married in November in Vannes, France. I hope to be able to go, as well as spend a little time in the city I love so well.