Memory on Main

My wife is forever helping me find things I’ve misplaced. I’m like an illusionist whose only audience member is himself. The audience is more infuriated than entertained. My hands are kleptomaniacs in reverse that are keenly aware of the fuzzy zones in my memory banks. For years I have set little things in unlikely nooks. I have later overlooked these spots at least twenty seven times in frantic one-man search parties. Nowadays, Kelley and I throw one-man-one-woman search parties with dogs sometimes half-involved. I guess some experiences take root in remembrance while other experiences do not.

This blog post ended up involving both forgetting and remembering. My first encounters with Kelley were at open mic night at “The Old White Mule” in its subterranean location on Main Street in Columbia. Her curls would fall across her freckled face as she laughed at her own stage antics. She was a small planet of merriment with many moon-friends orbiting her joy. Deeply fearful of fun, I kept my distance like an awe-inspiring supernova.

This morning Kelley and I visited the unassuming entryway to that building that once thrummed with song. I wanted to photograph her face at the place where first I saw her face. Naturally, I wanted to arrive at first light for metaphorical reasons, and my miraculous wife was accommodating. Thinking metaphorically distracted me from the literal fact that I had left a somewhat essential lens adapter ring on the dining room table. None of my lenses appropriate for dawn light could be mounted to my camera. I ended up using a newly-adopted technique known as free-lensing which involves holding the lens over the camera mount without physically attaching it. It produces images that are sharp in some areas and mysteriously blurred in others. In other words, it makes my camera function like my memory does.