my next-to-the-last wedding of the year is today. i’ve got a BAD sore throat. thus far in my career, i’ve managed not to have to work a wedding sick, so this will be first for me.

but i thought of this because of what my daughter said about staying away from guys right now and not getting married EVER. i SO felt the same way about women from time to time. several times, even. but in fact, i met the Spouse Unit just three weeks after i had TOTALLY given up on women. our meeting was completely unexpected, and our getting together was more than a surprise. so every time i shoot a wedding, i’m reminded of all the things that were pouring through my head ‘back then’ (positive and negative), and i’m still somewhat amazed that people actually want to get married, despite being happily married myself.

i was engaged three times in my life. sometimes when i look back, the acts of engagement were almost more significant than the acts of marriage that i’ve partaken in. they were emotional promissory notes that seemed to me to have more significant as a promise held in trust as opposed to the exercising of that trust. and if it weren’t for the exercising of Will, which is what a marriage ceremony is about, one of those earlier promises would still have been in effect.

which is not to belittle marriage in any way. there is something grand and inspirational about any marriage, as two people commit before witnesses to join their lives together, even when that joining is only a formality. i normally allow myself to get somewhat caught up in those emotions while i’m capturing wedding scenes, but with the way i feel today, i believe i’ll be more of an impartial observer. perhaps i’ll see some things today that alter my perception of this process.

regardless, every wedding i serve reminds me of my own wedding to the Spouse Unit and as such, during every wedding i serve, i silently renew my vows to her. it’s the least i can do, i suppose, since the weddings are part of what keeps me from spending more time with her and our children.

of bluer skies and rain

and then like rain these fetters fall and crash upon the floor

windows on a world and pictures moving sway and tumble
come to me and sweet surrounded water-torn love me
sing to me your songs of love and unity and peace and joy
and i shall sing to you and cling forever like the dawn’s sun rising warm

when winter comes and covers me in cold and blanket screaming
warm me with your heart and soul and spirit and your strength
and like these cracking windows melt and break the chains that bind me

~ Abiline, Texas; September 1988
~ © 1988, 2003

long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, my first love was Music, and She was mine i was Hers. those who received a copy of “the sabre” may remember that quite a few of those 333 poems made references to musical inspiration. as well, and undocumented, many of those “poems” were lyrics i created to remember melodies that i didn’t have the time or equipment to otherwise record.

{and yeah, on a side note, the number 333 was significant, because i consider myself only half evil. shut up.}

the ghost that i laid to rest, and which i’ve honestly not discussed with anyone yet, was a surprising ghost to revisit and to now have at ease, for it was a ghost in the form of a blockage. meeting up with this ghost was neither foreseen nor planned, and now creates an interesting conundrum for me. i already find myself once again driving around and humming to myself instead of listening to the radio. anybody got a decent midi keyboard they want to donate to the cause? it ain’t like i’m allowed to buy photographic equipment these days, let alone musical stuff. i have songs in my head again, and many of them were originally composed when i was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 18, riding on my bike in my old neighborhood.

The view going south down Mertz Avenue at Senova Street. The title given to this photo in the popup is from Simple Mind’s “This Earth That You Walk Upon”, one of my favorite songs at the time I left San Antonio (most memories associated with this song are actually from Austin, though), and which literally happened to come up in my playlist rotation while I was writing this.

so, as i already stated, and as you have probably already guessed, i went by the house i grew up in. it’s a humorously eclectic thing i do, this working in numbers. i drove by the house exactly three times. it’s effectively been twenty-one years since i was there (in fact, i got a kick out of telling people i was last in San Antonio an “adult ago”—think about it….), which is the seventh third (or the third seventh, if you prefer). either way, basic primes hold a relevance for me for many reasons. numerologically speaking, 3 is the number which relates to resurrection, revival and rejuvenation and 7 is the law of motion. any other Jungian correlations are strictly intentional (so there, hah!)

my first drive down Teakwood Lane was a bit disconcerting. during my last couple of years of high school, there was a field across Jones-Maltsberger Road from us that used to have baseball fields when i was younger, and which was being built up. in fact, the construction site itself became a haunt of mine, but since i have fonder memories of being much younger, i found that having the whole area between Jones-Maltsberger and the MacAllister Freeway built up to be just kind of sad.

the tree on the left of these photos and i used to have a great relationship, despite my falling out of it one year. the big knot up front was depressing to see. when i was last there for a brief drive-by when i brought The Elder and Unknown and her mother home back in 1990, that was a fresh cut. the limb-that-used-to-be was a handy foothold, and thus a launchpad for many a youthful excursion in responsibility-evasion.

i took these two photos on the second drive-by. anxious at the potential of accidentally running into my adoptives, i didn’t really have the camera setup for high-speed snaps while moving on the first drive-by, and while i see now that those photos were easily correctable, i wasn’t confident of that at the time.

on the third drive-by, which was just after i met with Sherri briefly out at MacArthur Park, my adoptive father was home, standing in the window of the den (under the carport) and talking on the phone. in the space of a second or slightly more, i thought and re-thought about stopping approximately seven times, while simultaneously setting the camera down. i luckily managed not to rear-end a parked car on the side of the street and called it quits and went on back downtown to the Spouse-Unit .

it was just a brief glance, but it was far more disconcerting than seeing the commercialization of a formerly relatively open field. the image hasn’t been in my dreams as of yet, but i’m sure it will be soon enough

Sherri (who sadly falls into the category of “old friend”) has been bugging me about how the trip went for me. sadly, i am still assimilating it. she also thinks the “installment method” sucks. oh well. there’s always a critic somewhere. responsibilities aside, the reason why i’m doing the installment thing is because one post would be terribly long, and i’m told i’m better when taken in smaller doses.

so….hrm….where to start with this one?

i guess i’ve already noted the most important part: we didn’t get to meet The Elder and Unknown after all. she won’t be getting her driver’s license until her 18th birthday, and since she is living again with her mother and step-father, her personal freedom is anything but expansive. the Spouse-Unit did call her and talk with her a bit, which i think was odd for both of them, but pleasant as well. i think it meant a lot to The Elder and Unknown that we did try to meet with her. the Spouse-Unit says she didn’t sound too terribly Texan, so i guess there’s hope for her future! (oh, me SO funny).

we stayed at the Hyatt downtown along the River Walk, as i mentioned before. it looks something like this from the River level, and this is the inside of the hotel. the last time i was there was my senior year of high school for the Texas State Choir concert. they made us all stay there, even though some of us were from San Antonio. talk about blurred memories! (in a positive way!)

our room was on the second floor (which because of two floors of conference and meetings rooms, is actually the fourth floor), but i did go up top and take some photos looking down. a little over halfway up on this photo, just right of center, one floor is jogged in a little to the right. right there was the room we stayed in.

when i have the time to get a gallery of photos from the trip up online, you’ll see that i frequently pretended #1 Daughter and #1 Son were along, and i tried to capture things i knew they’d like to see. however, when i get that gallery up, i know i’m going to be asked to get other galleries up, so i have to go carefully with these things. wedding season approacheth, and all that….

this was taken a few minutes prior to the photo i included upon my return—the bridge down there being where i took that photo from. this part of the River Walk is not a natural part of the river. i think it was made sometime during the 1970’s. just past that bridge and to the right, is the Convention Center. to the left is some sort of shopping extravaganza from hell that didn’t exist when i was growing up….er….getting older….down there. it was under construction when i briefly returned to San Antonio after Basic Training. like any mall, it has a cheap food court, so the Spouse-Unit and i ate over there a couple of times.

so, i guess that’s enough tap-dancing around impressions of the place while playing tour guide to my semi-nostalgic reminiscences.

to be honest, i could have driven around San Antonio anywhere i wantedd (traffic and reconstruction endeavors allowing, of course), but i didn’t. on the initial drive in from the airport downtown to the Hyatt, it was immediately clear that we were simply visiting some big-ass city. since in so many other interpretations i wasn’t coming home, i slipped into a comfortable tourist mode. the Spouse-Unit and i had to do the same thing over the summer when we visited Albuquerque. the River Walk was “safer” in that regard: it’s changed a bit, and a couple of the restaurants i liked back then no longer exist. but even with those changes and the construction on some parts of it, it felt a lot more homier than anywhere else i visited. plus being so picturesque, it was much more personally gratifying to hang out down there and shoot than slog around in the traffic and try to catch brief glimpses of half-remembered places.

i did go back to my old neighborhood, and will probably write about that little excursion next. like everything else, it had changed a lot. i drove by old schools and places where i used to hang out: all measurably changed, not that i expected anything else. change is always noticeable when you aren’t in the middle of it happening. but since i was pretty young when i left, and hadn’t really been driving all that long either, my memories of San Antonio are ultimately pretty confined to downtown, my old neighborhood (several square miles if you include where we lived across to where i went to school and where many of my friends lived), Loop 410, places i went to church, the Mission Trail, etc.

actually, i remember more detail about Albuquerque than i do San Antonio, and i spent barely 1/3 of the amount of time there. San Antonio has just become so huge, i wonder if, unless you live there or visit frequently, it’s really much like coming home for anyone. extrapolating from the 2000 Census, the city is pretty close to twice as populated as it was when i left back in the mid-1980’s, and it shows no signs of slowing down. ah….progress….

i used this lens a lot along the River Walk, largely because it’s representative of my memories of growing up down there. an inherent myopia and a type of fixation that was rarely exactly on center. the particular location i shot this from makes it look like i was on a boat myself, but i wasn’t, nor was i in the water (ew! yes, it really is that green without any early Saint Paddie’s Day shenanigans).

it might be fun to take the kids down there someday, but that would probably be more of a Six Flags/Sea World kind of thing—which brings to mind that those places didn’t exist while i was growing up there, either. i’m glad i went along with the Spouse-Unit on this trip, though. i seem to have finally laid to rest at least one old ghost (i’ll write about that later), and seeing the changes to some of the places that used to haunt my dreams has brought me at least a little peace.