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With any luck at all, one day soon I hope to be able to shoot sports in the back country, to find the high places where the runners go. Like I used to do before age and injury caught up with me and put me on the bench. In the meantime I have to continue to shoot what I can see – the light – in the moment, where I am. Maybe not as exciting as the other but I am here so I might as well do the best I can with what I’ve got.

I was up all night, in my sister’s house in Brooklyn; we were there for Thanksgiving. I fell asleep, finally, in a chair that used to be in my parents’ house fifty years ago; I used to fall asleep in it when the night was too long, when I was too drunk or high, when I was lost. When I woke up dry-mouthed, a bit disoriented, this is what I saw. The quiet and the light drew me in, memory and light; I made the image.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I went out his morning with a migraine coming hard in my head. Gotta hate that. Decided that a walk in the cool early morning would be just the thing – far better than the usual painkillers. Walked some, inhaled, exhaled, and looked all around. The morning sky was misty, creating halos around the stars. I had forgotten to put on my glasses – the stars appeared to be surrounded by pinwheels, like gospel wheels “a rollin’ way in the middle of the air.”

I stopped, looked up in wonder and bid goodbye to the migraine and welcome to what might be a better day.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I like the light in this first image on account of it was fading fast and felt magical to me. Not a special image, or a flashy image for that matter It just felt like bein’ safe at home on the edge of a summer storm when I took it.

In the next image, I had just finished a workout on my deck and noticed that the sun had dropped behind the house. It was suddenly a bit chilly, despite the sweat I had worked up and the heavy breathing that had overtaken me. I leaned on the railing to catch my breath and to stop the flood of thoughts: that exercising to recover my health had brought on the END TIMES for me. And I was also thinking, not for the first time, that 911 was my new favorite number. The chill inside a summer day is a theme in my life and has been for years; as a kid at summer camp knowing too soon that the fun and games would likely end before I got that first kiss from the red haired girl in cabin three; that school was starting and that meant all the pressure around getting into college to avoid the draft for Vietnam was already building up; that the days of ease at the cottage on the big lake were drifting and real work in the city would take over with all the striving and scheming that made up my life in those days. It went further back than all that, to a time when my family ran a hotel in the Catskill mountains that would empty out completely on Labor Day morning, the vast lobby and dining room empty of all but a few stragglers. In my memory, every year clouds covered the noonday sun, as I felt the chill of fall as we packed up and headed home to the city.

Now, that is a lot of stuff for a brief instant on the railing of the deck. But even so, when I saw the image above, I knew that I was right on time and exactly where I belong, doing what I do.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

“The camera sees what I, unconsciously, want to see, because it feels that way: a painting by Winslow Homer, a Matisse blue, a quiet, surreal mind scape where all is possible, where everything is in its proper place; a reflection of my childhood’s memory of a far- off place occupied by happy elephants and talking monkeys, a place long gone but apparently still with me.”

This paragraph is part of a piece i wrote in 2010 about a image of a boat.(http://lifeasahuman.com/2010/photography/minnesota-sunrise/). it was one my first attempts to write about both the process and results of my photography work. I changed the tense in the paragraph because it is still the case that photography for me is about the relationships of light and memory in the frozen instant of the shutter click; and the end result is still and forever what it is, more so than what was intended or found accidentally, despite the skill and technology if faithfully applied to the end product. And now that I am SEVENTY years old I am claiming a Senior Dispensation.

The photograph that follows is called “Old Man in a Hat.” I don’t see any happy elephants there or talking monkeys but I know them and they are part of how I do what it is that I do to stay engaged and productive. This is not so easy given the health challenges that are now part of who I am in the world. I am a writer, a photographer, Grandpa Michael, a recovering addict and all the rest of it. When asked how I am I generally say fine, this despite a medical file the size a Volkswagen Beetle circa 1967.

So why are there three images of boats in black and white in this piece? Mostly because I like them; they are among my favorite images, they capture my long lived sense of ghosts in the aftermath of activity – the moment when a favorite place is out of season. Where all the guests go home. When the fall chill inhabits the last breeze off the lake and the summer is over. When the chill is inside your bones and sometimes inside your heart and you shudder quickly and do not know why, and all is lost for awhile. You come to know that it is time to hunker down, draw the family close, shutter the windows, chop and stack the fire wood; time to get ready to ride out the winter winds of another trip around the Sun.

Turning seventy on Sunday last had that feeling for me. Recognizable and familiar. I wanted to embrace that world inside the poet’s phrase: “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” Hell, I will say it again just like he does: “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” Want to ain’t enough. Now is my time, older boy of summer that I am, and winter is comin’ in.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

The phone rang early this morning. It was Lyla and Josie, my granddaughters, calling to say hello and tell me that I still have very funny hair. Which I do. Because I can. I used the moment of laughter to lace up my newish speedy-go-fasters and get after a hill workout. While I was out there I found myself lost in the memory of another early morning run years before that turned out to be the beginning of the end of my hard times and the beginning of a none-too-easy journey to here.

Years ago, I thought this morning, I met the ghost of myself talking aimless in anonymous streets across America. I never did meet “the best minds of my generation”  while running down the “Negro streets” of Terminal City at dawn. I was not the best mind of my generation but, yeah, I was there looking for an “angry fix”; there was “madness and I was starving, broken, naked.” And then it ended with me on my knees praying to a god I had never believed existed and with whom I was interminably angry. I heard myself ask to be allowed to go to sleep and a while later to be allowed to wake up. The sun rose that morning as always. I put on a pair of rarely used running shoes and went out into the wreckage of my life piled up on the front stairs of my house. Without a glance back I took off down the street, made the turn to 4th avenue and stopped running – maybe I had run 100 yards.

I found my way to the back door of Jacques’ cafe – sort of next door to my running store of choice and directly across the street from the new Spandex garden of a gym for those with too much money and time on their hands. Jacques asked me how I was, and when I told him I was okay, he shrugged in his Gallic way and gave me a bowl of his excellent French pea soup. When I asked him for a couple of eggs, he asked me if I had any money. I said grandly, “Put it on the tab, please.” He said he couldn’t do that until I brought the total down. He seemed almost apologetic. I did not get angry – I was too tired and, amazingly, grateful for his kindness over the previous months. I had been in what turned out to be the end stages of my crack addiction; he had seen it, called me on it and kept me fed until as he put it, I got my head out of my ass. I was so messed up (read selfish) and using all my money for drugs that I had taken unholy advantage of his kindness and run up a big bill, way too big for a small cafe. I said thank you for the soup and went out into the sunlight.

I bumped into a guy who had been a lifelong friend with whom I had fallen out not a couple of years before. He was with his soon-to-be new wife, and they both greeted me with sweaty smiles and hugs, having just “trained” over at the gym across the way. “You look fabulous,” said they to my crack-racked, disappearing body with its unused running shoes on full display. “You have lost a lot of weight – you look great” ( I, fyi, call that phrasing the traditional Jewish greeting). I did my imitation of a smile and nodded enthusiastically at the great virtue of being crack-cocaine wasted and apparently stylin’. We had been friends since we were teenagers 40 years before. I turned to go home, mumbling about finishing “my run.” I made sure I was out of sight before I broke down and wept for the simple sadness of the deception, the total waste of it all.

I had kept everything hidden from nearly everybody for all those years, lived easily with being thought an asshole and worse. My old friend had his own troubles and, unbelievably, would contract a bug that inevitably became Acute Myeloid leukemia (AML) and he died 3 years later. I was clean and sober as that happened and we got in touch, he from his hospital bed, me from my new home in North Texas. He was unabashedly pleased to hear my amends and delighted to hear that I was finally clean and living decently. His happiness for my recovery seemed pure and without hesitation. I could not get to his memorial but he is always present in my life. We were friends for a long time through some very difficult circumstances. And so we shall remain.

Shortly after I got out of treatment, I arranged through a friend to get Jacques the money I owed him. I never heard from him although my friend said that Jacques had smiled when he took the money and asked if I was doing okay, and when she said I was, he shrugged as if say to I’m glad it worked out; it doesn’t always.

I walked this morning up the steep hill outside my front door – up the hill and north over the next hill and back, and I finished with a short jog up the little hill that runs directly in front of my house. The great adventure took 35 minutes. I was able to do a little lifting when I got back from the “hills”; then I took the car to get it washed, for the first time in a year, and bought myself a skinny cappuccino on the way home.

I checked out my shoe rack, which sits near my font door, and yes there are many pairs of unused running shoes waiting for me and my physical recovery to show up and take them out to do what they do so well.

This morning has been a long time coming and as they say, it will be a long time gone. I couldn’t be more grateful. Or more humbled.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.