Archives for September 2013

Tarmac Meditations #132: Friday Night Lights

September 29, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Down the road from me there is well-lit open space that looks a lot like a football field in a ring of lights. It is in fact a park filled with softball fields that is lit up all summer long and often in the fall though I don’t know why since the games are long over having become the stuff of beer fueled stories amid much laughter.

The lights are very bright and can be seen from from a great distance away. In the fall the fog rolls in from the ocean. The light disperses in the fog leaving an arch in the night air. On these nights, I sometimes imagine that I can hear the sounds of shouts and cheering riding the night wind and I imagine folks who are young and for whom the future is filled with endless summers of softball and water skiing and star filled nights at the beach.

I remember that it was once like that for me. On these nights I can remember my friend Phil and I leaving a softball game at 9 PM in a Canadian city that became synonymous with the draft resistance during the Vietnam War. We were carrying our baseball gloves and chatting about our plans. I remember that the air was velvet soft and redolent with summer flowers. It was pretty clear to both of us that we were going to live forever. It didn’t work out that way. Phil died four years ago and these days I spend a great deal of time doing what I can do to stoke the fires to keep the darkness at bay. Every photograph I take is part of the process as is the writing which is no longer easy if it ever was. Dictating is complicated because the words are sometimes garbled. I am about to teach myself how to type properly because when I am dictating, my fingers keep moving as though I was typing. It is as if they are my Marines at the point of attack bringing the words to the blank page. Sometimes I see the arc of light in the distance as an invitation to something better … a promised land like in “Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly”. I have always thought that song was not for children but rather a junkies’ lament but I know deep down that I must keep writing. I must if only because it’s what I can do everyday to stoke the fire and take another step.

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Tarmac Meditations #131: Magical Mystery Tour

September 22, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz 37 Comments

Are you kidding me? Seriously my eyes are 50% of what they used to be and my small motor skills, as in typing, are a joke to behold. To put it mildly it’s a bit of a challenge to be a writer / photographer these days, a magical mystery tour if you will. I’ve actually lost count of the number of little mini strokes that I have had; each one seems like another shot across the bow carrying information that I don’t understand so I continue to do what there is to do in front of me. I take the meds, I go to the docs, I have the conversations and then later as the end of day closes in I tell myself that the stuff going on in my mind is the same silly stuff that’s been going on for years. The fantasies where I am the hero of my own daydream. Somehow I will overcome all of the attacks by people as yet unknown and entirely made up. What’s been left out are the stories where I die a heroic death doing something noble for mankind because that’s a little too close to the bone. I need to remind myself on a regular basis to pay attention to what’s right in front of me and that fantasy, while it is a working tool for the writing I do and the pictures I take, is a very dangerous place for me to go alone.

I have marked progress by my ability to go to bed without worrying about waking up; it’s lately that I’ve been doing that pretty regularly. The damage to my back is slowly healing and while I have canceled all of my shooting assignments, I still pick up my camera every day to take a picture. I like to shoot in black and white because that’s how I see the world these days … in black and white and shades of gray. The picture above is a sunset. I like it. I like the split focus to the right hand of the frame. Nothing that I do in my work is easy any longer. It all requires my paying attention to the smallest detail of the work process and it requires that I have patience with my constant mistakes.

Typing is complex for me. I am dictating this piece and I hope it works. I need to be patient with myself and a universe that is more random than I ever knew. Generally, all I can do is stay steady and be aware of the kindness and compassion of my friends. I think of this piece as a Tarmac Meditation. I am still on the road, still doing what I set out to do. In the old hippie phrase, I’m keepin’ on keepin’ on. What else is there to do?

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Tarmac Meditations #130: Note to my Editor

September 8, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I am swimming upstream in a river of fog, I am wrecked on shoals carved by indifferent time. The meds are having a fiesta with my sanity and my clarity. Possibly too, my vocabulary. Hopefully the re-write is useful and on target. The other draft read as if it had been written by a crew of monkeys in search of Hamlet in the original English.

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First Posted At – Tarmac Meditations – Voices from The Middle of the Pack