Remembering

I've been seeing bus ads around the city mentioning The Gates again, some sort of retrospective. They were here three years ago. Being made to remember, I went looking at my photos of them again.

I remember arguing with a friend of mine who refused to even look at the park from the windows of her express bus, because she thought they "defiled nature." I pointed out that Central Park was no more natural than a suburban garden, that the lakes and streams have on/off taps and drains, that the entire landscape was planned carefully and bulldozed into place (or whatever machinery was available) with the exception of the rocks. As there are already sculptures, statues, benches, lamp-posts, walkways, bridges, fountains, buildings and every other sort of park furniture aplenty, what's a few hundred bright orange Gates?

I made plans a week in advance to experience The Gates with a friend on a Friday. Then, the day before our plan, my mother passed away. There was nothing for me to do other than leave the hospital, visit the funeral home, and go home and start making phone calls and emails. She had no personal possessions outside of the few things in her hospital room and nursing home room, and they could wait. So that Friday I went to the park as planned, with my friend and also my husband. My friend had lost her mother about six months before, and now we had a shared need for life-affirming experiences.

Filling a wintry day in a bare gray and brown park with life, color and people was one of the best things I've ever seen. I felt excited, exhilarated, and privileged to be there. I wished my mother could have seen it, but there were many things she missed. We all miss wonderful things for either good or bad reasons.

Every now and then I find myself experiencing life with my camera instead of my eyes. Digital cameras make this less obvious, as you're looking at a large monitor screen from a distance instead of through a tiny viewfinder eyehole with the camera body blocking all else, but framing the picture on the monitor, instead of looking at the thing itself, all too often I'm still missing something. During my Gates walk I captured moments of a once-in-a-lifetime event but I also made sure to shut off the camera now and then and simply walk, and touch, and laugh, and be.

OK back to orchids, knitting and other stuff again.