Category: Family and Friends

Teach your youngsters: “No. Yell. Go. Tell.”

This past Friday evening Sophia and I spent an hour at Black Belt Leadership Academy. It was the third and last introductory class offered in cooperation with the neighborhood recreation department. Among other useful teachings Sensei Mark Weinberg taught the young students how to handle being approached by “strangers.” He recommended they remember four words, “No. Yell. Go. Tell.” In essence if asked to approach the stranger – say, “No.” If the stranger approaches you – “Yell and Go.” And most certainly, “Tell a teacher, parent, neighbor and/or guardian.” Great advice.

Additional photographs from the class can be viewed here.

(click photograph for larger view)

Leica M8, 50 mm Summilux Asph

Too young! Dear Alisa – too young!

This morning, as I waited for coffee to brew,
I read the following heartfelt words,
written by my daughter, Tanya:

“Farewell my sweetest, my dearest friend.
Farewell, my inspiration, my muse, my confidante….all my love, Alisa.
May your new travels be incredible and limitless.
I already miss you so much.”

beautifully expressing deep love, and heart-rending loss

Alisa, Tanya’s best friend since high school,
mom to two young daughters, Sig’s beloved wife, daughter and sister, friend to so many
— danced to life’s rhythms with the soul of an artist —

Damn these cancers — damn them all.

I photographed Alisa on 4×5 polaroid print film for her high school year book.

A half dozen years ago Alisa borrowed my Linhof Tech IV
in order to practice her own photography, using some of Polaroid”s last run of various print films.

Alisa, Anderson, Strautmanis, Venus: Beautifully, intensely unforgettable

Here – the day she bought my M6 Classic with 28 mm Elmarit

and finally
A soul escaping confinement, Watercolor on paper, Shadowbox, 1980 by George Lottermoser

What are friends for?

Wendell Berry wrote, “Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,” are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another as a soul “dies” into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing…” — Wendell Berry, from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (He also published a collection of essays titled What Are People For?)

This photograph of my friend Doug, with a couple friends, at his 50th Wedding Anniversary dinner seems to express all this.

(click photograph for larger view)

Canon 5D, 70 – 200 mm L USM IS