Post A Picture of Yourself Thread VIII

[Torie]

I enjoyed your pics Snowguy. What a beautiful spot you live in.

Here is a total artificial "landscape" that I had some hand in.



Link

[Torie]

Ya, I will delete it with a mini version in a couple of days. But the mini version pic sucks.

[Torie]

Enough said. Butt ugly gringo in Mexico pic, this one with a local carpenter, in his front yard, with his wood working shed to the left, and his home behind it. He liked to drink even more than I did.

[Torie]

Grandson and grandpa. Grandpa died shortly after this photo was taken sometime in the spring or summer of 1955, on Christmas Day 1955. I think  my visage reveals my character quite well - cautious, skeptical, inquisitive, and a bit melancholy and pessimistic. What do you think?  I was shipped off to Iowa to live with my grandparents for a few months, because my mother was having "problems." Gramps took me everywhere, to his medical office, to lectures, to the Outing Club. I was quite well behaved, but then would depose Gramps after about the meaning of it all. His wife was worried that he was spoiling me rotten, and she was right, and well also wrong.

 Grandpa hoped I would be a football player like he had been (he paid his way as a football coach as coincidence would have it, at my subsequent alma mater, under Alonzo (?) Stagg, to pay his way through medical school), but alas that was not in the cards. I suspect his thinness here, was a portent of his final exit.

Speaking of Grandma, during that stay, one morning I told her that going to nursery school was discommoding me, and I preferred to spend my valuable time in other pursuits. She said, well Grandpa has his job healing the sick, and I have my job running this household and feeding the men in the house, ie Grandpa and yourself, and your job is to go to nursery school! It was like a light bulb went on, and I picked up my things, and decamped to the other venue without a further word. Grandma loved to tell me that tale years afterword, but she need not have. I remember it like it was yesterday. Our brains work in mysterious ways, but at age 4, thanks to her, I learned a  valuable lesson. We each have our jobs, and our job, is job one.

[Torie]

Very nice picture, Torie. Thanks for posting!

You are welcome sir. It is an art piece I think, but I am not objective about that. You can imagine how moving it was to me, to see it for the first time, 53 years later. I am glad I remained long enough on this mortal coil to see it, at last! 

[Torie]

Black and white is more evocative of that with which we connect emotionally. Color gets in the way. I don't know why our brain works that way, but it does. Even a sanguinary slaughter would be more elegiac in black and white than color, because the color is just too up close and personal. One needs a bit of distance to connect. Whatever. Black and white photos move me, and I have paid some fair coin for ones I love. Color ones do not, and never have.

But I love this one best for personal reasons. It's priceless to me.