Karen Anderson over on Writer Way is passing around a meme (a word whose heyday has come and gone, in my opinion) on "Five Things You Don’t know About Me." Here are my five.
My brother Cliff in our bedroom, c. 1964, the earliest image in my files.
1). As a child I spent evenings and Sunday afternoons in the darkroom "helping" my father. As with every incipient photographer, the experience of seeing an image magically appear in the developer tray was revelatory. I craved this magic for myself. I must have been 6 or 7 at the time. One day, when he was at work, I trespassed into the sanctum of the darkroom, brought up three trays into the bathroom, and filled them with water. I then went to his secretary in the upstairs hallway, and took out several sheets of writing paper. I slipped the writing paper into the tray, just like I had seen my dad do. Nothing happened! My father wasn’t mad when I told him what I did, and he taught me how it all worked, starting with developing the film that I shot in my Brownie camera. Before long I couldn’t wait for him to come home from work so that he would load the film developing reel (an act of dexterity beyond me at that age), but I could do everything else on my own.
2) I was president of my high school student government. It seems improbable, as I was terribly shy and introverted, but I was also very political at that age. I wrote letters to the paper against the Vietnam war, I was part of a group that emerged from the first Earth Day event in our town, Youth Against Pollution, I started an underground newspaper in high school and I spoke up at school board meetings on student rights. In my senior year I worked on the McGovern campaign, a lost cause in our neck of the woods. I shared a car with my step-brother, who was a Nixon supporter. We had dueling bumper stickers on the back—McGovern on the left side, of course.
3) You know how when you’re driving across the middle of nowhere, like in the bottom of Idaho or the middle of Kansas, and you see a lone bicyclist, 20 miles from the nearest anything, with bulging panniers and wads of rucksacks on the racks, and wonder, what the heck is he doing way out here, and why? That would have been me, pretty much anytime in the 70’s and early 80’s. Home over spring break? Just a 500 mile ride. I’m moving to Idaho, from Minneapolis? Everything I need would fit on the bike. You ride a bike through North Dakota, and you’re treated like a National Geographic special coming through town. I don’t think I ever had to buy a breakfast, or a beer, in that state.
4) I have helped set up and launch fireworks shows. Both big barge shows, and small hand-fired ones. For several years I worked as a pyrotechnician in a crew, where you spend the day filling morters with shells and wiring them up, and then spend hours after the show tearing everything down. The whole point, though, is that big orgasm of the show itself, and you’re at the very center of it. The noise and the light is impossibly loud and brilliant. Fire rains down upon you. It overwhelms any other thought or sensation except the potent power of the dangerous moment. The biggest show I worked on was the Tacoma 4th of July. When a 20" shell launches from 20 feet away, the entire barge recoils.
5) Not only am I a National Public Radio junkie, I’m an NPR game show contestant and talk show guest. I am a failed contestant on "Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me (The NPR News Quiz)" , which is why I don’t have Carl Kasell on my home answering machine. And in 1995 Robin and I were the featured guests on "Talk of the Nation" on a Valentine’s Day show on personal ads, which is how we had met four years previously. Robin was answering two ads a week in her search for a mate. She answered mine because there were no good ones that week.
"..no good ones that week" Brilliant. This was a lot of fun to read.
Posted by: Eric Hancock | November 26, 2006 at 06:05 AM
Really enjoyed this. I chuckled at that delightful story about your early darkroom days -- thanks for sharing.
Posted by: romanlily | November 28, 2006 at 05:52 PM