Sentinel

(Photographer unknown. I have no pictures of my own today.)

I'm stuck in god damned place, going nowhere, growing catatonic. It is mental, it is physical. It is like a walking coma. I can't sleep, am tired, want to do things then can't. Clinical? When it happens, things go wrong. Somehow I managed to update the operating system on the old computer I use to scan, and now the scanner won't work. Not compatible. I must go back to the old system but don't know how. It took me hours to realize what had happened, sitting, pulling cables, restarting, shutting down, etc. I need to travel. I need a trip.

* * * * *

Last night after leaving my mother's, I drove to my studio thinking to do a little something. The roads were almost empty, the lights of Christmas shining on the little boulevard, white lights on an empty road. As I crossed a street, I saw a car that looked like mine passing through the intersection. It was white, it was a Volvo, it had surf racks. The fellow driving honked his horn. I would have honked back, but my horn no longer functions. I pulled into the back lot of my studio and got out of the car. I saw lights swinging off the street, then heard the tires coming up the drive. It was the fellow in the white Volvo. He pulled up grinning from ear to ear.

"Hey," he said, "Cool car. What year is that?"

"'85."

"Wow! Mine's an '89."

I stood on the driver's side running board and talked to him over the roof there in the darkness of the big parking lot outside the building under the fluorescent glow of the security lights. On the passenger side beside him was a shadowed figure, a woman. I wondered what she thought of this, but I couldn't see her face. He asked me some more questions. I told him I bought the car in 1996 for $4,600, but that it was falling apart now piece by piece. He sat there for a while with a big grin on his face saying nothing, not even looking at me or my car beside him but staring ahead with the strained grin. I listened to the echoed quiet of the night.

"She says you took a picture of her once."

"Really?" I found this odd, so I got down from the running board and went over to his car to look inside. It was a woman I had met with a friend on Christmas Eve at a cafe on the boutique boulevard. It was the day I bought the Nikon D-700 and I was taking photos of everything.

"Yea, yea, sure," I said, "I remember."

Then she mentioned my friend's name who she was with that night and the grin on the fellow driving the '89 Volvo began to harden with a growing artificialness. He asked me about my work in order to tell me he had a buddy who was a photographer.

"Oh, I don't do anything like that, no fashion or glamor or anything commercial. I'm just fooling around with some processes. . . ." I made a quick explanation. They wanted to come in and see. I had big boards scattered about the room and big prints. I've been waxing them and coloring them, making encaustics. We stood there and stared. I liked them, the prints, big, serious.

"Do you have a card?" he asked.

"No."

"Do you have a website?"

I thought a minute. I don't tell people about this one. I never know. They might be normal.

"No," I said, shaking my head as if I was trying to sell the idea. The girl looked very pretty in the light and I wanted to photograph her, but I could still feel the strain in the fellow over the last thing. She looked around at the accumulation of stuff and her gaze landed on the stuffed hawk that sits in the corner of the room.

"Do you know the bird rescue lady?" she asked me. "She just died, but she was famous for taking care of injured birds."

"No, but did she work with the Audubon Society. They have a facility. . . ."

"No, they rehabilitate big birds, birds of prey. She took care of little birds. I took her a chimney sweep one time. There is another lady who does it, too, but she is not as famous. I took her a baby squirrel once."

"Hmm. There seem to be a lot of squirrels."

"I knew a guy who kept a freezer full of squirrels," the fellow said cheerily. "He said he kept them in case of hard times."

I laughed and looked at the girl. "The lady probably put the baby squirrel in the freezer."

The fellow laughed and nodded his head in wild agreement. I looked at the girl and waited for her to show resistance, watched for her face to harden and turn.

"Probably," she said.

Suddenly the fellow introduced himself. We shook hands. And then they turned for the door. There is a rhythm to things that can't be explained. I walked them back out into the parking lot. They got into the Volvo and sat for a minute. Nobody said anything. The fellow's grin had come back just as it was when he pulled in. He sat staring and grinning. Then the car started and they were gone.

How odd, I thought, and weirdly enjoyable on a Thanksgiving night when no one is about, when people are in their homes with family and friends, or so one thinks when one is not. I stood outside awhile looking up at the sky. I am alone, I thought, as I so often am, a sentinel of nothing. Such things as this never happen when you are with someone. You never get to glimpse so much into the weirdness of life. Alone, though, you see traces of the spare strangeness of the thing we try to smooth over with narrative and meaning. But one never knows, really, what goes on, even on a day like Thanksgiving when everyone is with someone eating and drinking and watching football. Or so the story goes.