Faith, Or The Opposite Of Pride

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Location: Home.
Amusing Myself With: Scanner toys like "Gamma Adjustment".
Listening: "American Girl" ~ Tom Petty.

I will address Peter's entry of a few days ago at some point when I can finally collect my thoughts, which are still wheeling around. As you can imagine, I was knocked to my knees by what was written and I might well be staying there for a little while longer.

In the meantime, I've decided to learn a little by stealing his picture-posting method for my own space. As I've previously mentioned, I've been playing around with my Pentax quite a bit lately. I first used it to stave off a little of the creeping loneliness I felt during Peter's absence, but I've now become utterly lost in photography. It's early-ish on a Sunday, so for now, I'll skip the explanations of why and how and try to display the few snaps that have made my efforts to date worthwhile (at least, for me).

I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, a city which prides itself on three things: Elvis Presley; the best barbecue in the world; and Beale Street, the birthplace of the blues. From the age of six months, I was spending weekends with my parents in the Rendezvous, a little rib joint just off of Beale, gumming dry bones and buttered French bread. I grew up walking Beale with them after dark, under the neon lights of guitar shoppes and cafes that have played the same music since the 40's--B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday, "the great ones". Beale has seen its heyday and its near-ruin, but for as long as I've known it, it's always been the same--a place that holds the breath and hope and life of the city between its sidewalks. It's one of the places I always have to visit when I return home, just to remind myself of where I come from, when it's all said and done, and of what's important in the long run: good food, good music, and the ability to remember one's own history.

When I was six years old, my grandparents moved from Memphis to Enterprise, Mississippi, where my grandmother still lives in the house she was born in. I grew up spending summers in Enterprise, population 350, where the biggest attractions were trips to Meridian to ride the carousel and the annual watermelon harvest in July. When I write about red clay roads, slow-moving rivers, overgrown railroad ditches and nights spent drinking iced tea on the back porch, I'm talking about Enterprise and the house that my family has occupied for over 100 years.

During the summer of 1990, I spent three weeks touring six countries in Europe. We touched down in Zurich and travelled by bus to Lucerne, where we stayed at a small inn at the foot of the Alps. For three days, we slept on feather ticks and drank milk fresh from the cows grazing on the mountainside. When we ventured into the town of Lucerne, it was stunningly beautiful--and stunningly quiet. The shoppes all closed at six, the shopkeepers swept not only their doorsteps, but the streets in front of their stores, and, by nine, the city was dark and silent. I felt like I had stepped into a postcard.

We ventured down from Switzerland through the Italian Alps to Venice (one of my favorites cities in the world--also where my camera decided to spontaneously break), Florence (where I borrowed a friend's) and then into Rome. Our bus driver took us into the city via the original entrance, the Appian Way. I managed to lean out of the window as we were approaching and snapped the archway in the fading afternoon light.

From Rome, we travelled to Assisi, where we visited the Franciscan monastery on the hill overlooking the village. Our guide was a monk who spoke flawless English; when we asked, he admitted to having left his studies at UC Berkeley to join the brotherhood in Assisi. After we finished our tour of the monastery, which seemed to sit on a separate plane of absolute tranquility far above the peak of the mountain, I could understand his decision.

During my freshman year at USC, I was recruited for the College Bowl team. We won the University finals and travelled to Northern California for the state finals at Berkeley. I was overwhelmed by the fresh air, pine trees (an oddity in Southern California the lack of which I had already grown accustomed to), and groups of independent bookstores and coffee shoppes on every corner. I felt completely at home--something that I had, at that point, not felt living in Los Angeles. We spent the afternoon after the finals (which we lost to Stanford) roaming Telegraph and poppping in on Rasputin, Cody's, and the Berkeley bookstore. By the time we left, I was irrevocably hooked. My love for the Bay Area has grown with every subsequent visit.

On one of those subsequent trips to the Bay, I first visited City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's store that served as the socializing and distributing hub of the Beat writers and poets in San Francisco in the '50's. It has since become a second home. Whenever I'm in San Francisco, I spend my first day in North Beach, visiting the Green Tortoise hostel on Broadway, having a cup of coffee at the Irish pub (that I later realized had a branch in Seattle that Peter frequented) down the street, sitting in the cathedral in Washington Square and curling up in a corner on the second floor of City Lights, reading out-of-print DiPrima. I ramble down to Chinatown (for bao and enameled chopsticks) and the Haight (for a burrito at Zona Rosa), but I always return to "Little Italy" for my books and my food and my contentment.

I moved to Houston in the summer of 1999--and realized that leaving California was much more difficult than I had anticipated. In an effort to make me feel more at home, my boyfriend at the time took me into the city for the annual Arts Festival. We spent the afternoon walking the downtown streets, admiring the work of local artists and generally enjoying the balmy Sepetember weather. On the way back to our apartment, I managed to get a shot of the sculpture in front one of the office buildings. With its seeming defiance of gravity, I found it more interesting than anything at the show.