A rainy day in the face of humanity and COVID-19, Cambridge, MA – photopictorialist study by Linda Morgenstern. (c) L Morgenstern 2020

Today as a special treat, and to help us through these terrible times. I am reposting a photograph and essay by a dear friend documentary film maker, artist, and writer, Linda Morgenstern.

Mask Fail 3.

Daily dog walk.
Today is rainy and cold.
Neither Bella nor I want to be out for long.
We have finished our loop and are headed back.
A young couple is walking toward us.
Sister and brother…husband and wife?
It is impossible to know from a half a block away.

What is unmistakable is that the woman is crying.

Hard.

The man is holding her to keep her upright. Her body is buckling from the force of her sobbing. He pulls her toward his chest.

I cut cross the street and her face follows the sound of my footsteps. I am standing directly across them on the opposite sidewalk.

She can not catch her breath and I see her mask has been pulled down around her neck.

I can not look away from her sorrow and the shock in her eyes.

Some instinct pulls my own mask off so I can meet her with my exposed face.

My hand rises up to my chest in the place I think holds my heart. I feel my eyes close and I bow to her.

The sacred in me.
The sacred in you.

The scared in all of us now.

I have been thinking about what it means to take off a mask.
Literally and figuratively.
And how backwards everything is.

We protect each other from ourselves by wearing masks.
We are no longer visible to each other behind our masks and our doors.

But behind our individual shields, our masks are being stripped away.

A friend who lives in New York City tells me, by Messenger, he saw a man dying from his window as EMT’s were unable to resuscitate his neighbor. It was, he said, horrible.

I remember when I moved to NYC in 1980. I was twenty and stunned by the casualness of New Yorkers stepping over the bodies of men and women sprawled on the sidewalks and in the doorways. Addicts, alcoholics, the floridly psychotic, and people who ended up on the street because circumstances had moved beyond their control and nothing and no one was there to catch them.

It took less than a month for me, walking from midtown to my apartment downtown in the East Village, before I no longer stopped and asked if I could help. I had become a New Yorker with a brisk walk, avoiding bodies without missing a step.

Today I feel spring almost turn back into winter as evening approaches. New England is like that in its threat, in any month through the end of April, the inhospitable cold might reappear.

I walk the last few blocks home with a dog in one hand and a mask in the other. A sense of reverence from the love in the broken heart I just witnessed.

And I wonder, how common will it become to see the wracked sobs of strangers? How often will we see death out the window?

Will we fundamentally change, as a culture, when we know with full awareness that the last goodbye might already have been said? What will it feel like when the spectacle of private grief becomes a routine encounter?

Will we remember our shared humanity?
Will we recognize our interdependence?

Or will suffering and scarcity push us to ever greater divide?

Is it possible this is the moment when we find our collective heart and our political will?

For those communities tumbling into the deepest chasm, the answer is urgent.

In the quiet of the city I live in, I am increasingly aware of the birds singing. Have they ever been so loud or so beautiful as they are today?

Bird songs and sirens.

It has already become a familiar refrain.

Bird songs and sirens.

I take a last gulp of the rainy air with the words of my mother in my ears, “Wear a scarf. You could catch a death of a cold.”

How foolish to think this suffering of our making would not come to our own door.

(c) L. Morgenstern 2020

I thought that I would go simple today and share this link with everyone. The “Beast from the East” has brought a snowstorm to Rome and photographers have had a field day. There are some wonderful gems here.

It is such a rare event that I cannot find a decent quote to memorialize the event. Snow is magic and Rome is magic.

“Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.”

Anatole Broyard

The world-renowned Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum have been selected from some 50,000 entries and the overall winners will be announced on Oct. 17, 2017. For someone who has been known to photograph nature, the results are humbling. It is hard enough to get close enough to capture wildlife, leave alone achieve a well-composed sharp image. And then there’s the other thing, emotion and empathy. We want to relate to the animal being photographed to feel as it feels.

A selection of these finalist images can be seen on the NBC News website. I’m still trying to figure out which are my favorites. But to start there is Qing Lin’s image of clownfish peeking out like so many little Nemo’s from the tentacles of an anemone. Then there’s Justin Hofman’s poignant image of a seahorse holding on to a cotton swap in the poluted seas around Sumbawa Island in Indonesia. And if you’re going to pin me down to a favorite, it’s got to be the rain-drenched Bald Eagle in Dutch Harbor, Amaknak Island, Alaska.by Klaus Nigge. The look on this rather damp eagle is all telling and for the ages. Somedays nothing goes right.l

I will make the sacrilegious statement that baseball can get a bit long in the tooth during the dog days of August. Dog days nothing! Rather it took a tabby kitten to rally things up. This past Wednesday Saint Louis was trailing five to four in the bottom of the sixth with bases loaded, when a feral kitten ran onto the field and forced a game delay as a grounds keeper fielded the cat. It did not work out so well for the grounds keeper as the kitten unlike a baseball scratched and bit the poor fellow who was just doing his job.

After the kitten delay the game resumed and on the next pitch Yadier Molina hit a grand-slam home-run to win the game. The kitten was dubbed or anointed as “Rally Cat” for his game winning role. But alas, he “disappeared” in “the tunnel.” However, the story does have a happy ending as the next day “Rally Cat” was found on the streets of downtown Saint Louis. Adoption is in his adorable future. And as for the rest of us, we are left with this wonderful photograph by  Bill Greenblatt of the UPI. It is so like a cheetah flying at top speed over the African savanna. 

It’s been a while since I’ve commented about a press photograph. But let me first set the scene. In a unanimous vote last week the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions on the North Koreans because of their nuclear weapons program. It was a historic moment, beautifully captured by Mary Altaffer for the Associated Press. The image shows  Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, speaking to the Chinese ambassador, Liu Jieyi, just before the vote. The picture is unusual because it is very reminiscint of a candid photograph rather than a formal press shot. There is the pink dress, Amabassador Haley’s position, the expression on the two ambassadors faces, and the almost hands-touching posture. The photograph is brilliant in its spontaneity and the sense of detente that it conveys. It is something very unusual and well-crafted to my eye. So I am going to say, “Wow, now that’s a great photograph!”

When I was young I used to wonder why anyone would want Ambassador Haley’s position. The UN seems largely talk, talk, talk. I suspect the reality is deeper, and, of course, there is the matter of adding foreign policy experience to one’s resume.