Years ago, E, C, and I stood here, at this stone banister, looking down on the University of Pennsylvania's quad. We wore straw hats and alma mater colors. We had become what we had set out to be—degreed and ready for the world.
My freshman-year dorm room was in the far corner, on the fourth floor. My memories were of Spring Fling, Arlen Specter's son, the roommates whom I could not rescue and the ones who rescued me. E and C had been there throughout the best and worst of it—allowing the artist in me to talk to the scientists in them, enduring my endless hunt for emptiness in a decidedly urban place, staying near while I danced without regard in the quieting rooms of dying parties—and they are still in my life today. Yesterday, I sent E this photo. She replied, It really is beautiful, and so green.
That's how it struck me, too, yesterday, as I walked the campus with my camera. That's how it strikes me today, as I sit here at this desk, the day closing in around me. My mind is loose and wild and indeterminate with time. I am back then. I am right now. I'm ether and nether.
We considered foreground and background in English 145 yesterday—the interplay of primary and secondary, the fringe of context, the depth that is gained by incrementally adjusting the writer-observer's depth of field. We took our cameras out and searched for the iconic, then asked ourselves what lay beyond the chosen subject, what defined the borderlands, how the borderlands in turn shadowed and shaped the subject.
For my part, I returned to the Quad at Penn—my home during a tumultuous freshman year, when the new was alarming, and the raw was very real, and I was saved by a sophomore downstairs who played Bruce Springsteen loud in his room. We were just friends, but friends mattered most. They are what now come into view when weather and mood return me to then.
© Blogger templates Newspaper II by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
