Before I moved this past year, photographs I had taken over some vacations adorned the walls in my living room and the hallway to my house. I don’t profess to be anything near a professional 
photographer, but I know just enough to be dangerous (story of my life, at times).
In the living room, I had shots I had taken from visits to London, New York, Stonehenge and even some from just ye ole Greenville, NC. Not all are good — very few are really good, to be honest — but I favor one or two: the sepia photo of a saxophonist in a tunnel to the Westminster Station Tube line that took me 10 minutes to take as I sat on the floor of the tunnel waiting for the right moment when no one else was walking in either direction. You don’t see me dropping a couple of pounds into his box and nodding my thanks to him for letting me sit there for so long, but I remember.
Or the New 42nd St. Studios/The Duke on 42nd St building with all of its windows lit up in a rainbow of colors that took me at least another 10 minutes to take because I couldn’t time the shot right or didn’t like that there was too much of the same color in the shot. You don’t see me blowing on my freezing hands as I stand in the dirty slush of a 42nd Street gutter, waiting for the always-present New York traffic to drive past so that I could give it “just one more shot”, but I remember.
In the hallway, in a cheap black-and-gold frame whose few cracks I’ve fixed with a black permanent marker, I had the first picture (OK, what I feel is my first “good” picture) I ever really took with my father’s old 35mm camera, a camera I still have today. A somewhat blurry sailboat on San Diego Bay in front of the city’s downtown buildings. A testament of where I grew up, maybe you could say …
But the one that I just searched through the framed pictures that sit in 2-3 piles on the wavy, gold-and-red, diamond-checkered linoleum of the kitchen of the house I’m currently renting — ignoring the professionally framed Bachelor’s diploma and the personally framed certificate and $25 check that signifies the first time I ever got “paid” for my writing — is a picture I never took myself. I couldn’t even tell you who drew it.
It’s a 12×16 oil painting of what’s maybe a forest (or just a few trees and grass, if you’re picky) on a starry and quarter-moon night; an oil painting with brush strokes so thick that you can feel them with your fingertips. The only thing on the back are water stains, a faded “12 x 16” stamp in the center and a small sticker in the lower right corner that proclaims it to be a canvas of “45¢ value” but with a larger 33¢ price below it.
I couldn’t tell you where I bought it; I couldn’t tell you where I found and bought the cheap frame that now seems like it was always supposed to be around this canvas. Why keep it, you ask? Why hold on to something of such little “value” in the last two moves I’ve made in less than a year? Why would I make sure to pack it safely when I move again?
Maybe because someone took the time to put that brush to that canvas; maybe because someone may have priced it at 8¢ lower than its value sometime in its life, but that it still somehow found its way to someone who appreciates it. Maybe because it makes me wonder why the artist chose those trees, that moon — that night — as something worthy to paint. Was he or she alone or with a loved one? Was it a quiet night or did the wind rush through the leaves of the trees, covering the sounds of any animals underneath? Or was he or she just bored and needed something to do to quiet the internal rush of thoughts and doubts in the dead of night?
I don’t know, but when I look at it, even now, sometimes I think it’s just because it’s someone’s mark left in this world. Something that shows us the hope that we’re not alone, that maybe something we do will be remembered long after. Price it at whatever amount you want, but even a penny would make it worth the effort to not be forgotten.
