First Shot (Thanks, Nadia)

This here is a photo I took today from my yard. My wife bought me a camera yesterday as a gift, perhaps as a hint for me to get back to what I had liked doing more than 10 years ago but inexplicably stopped. So this is a good gift, God bless her, for what it means when I hold it in my hands and what it prods to me to do, which is not small: adjusting my methodology for living. I don't want to say fully what that means, because I'm still adjusting and part of the old methodology is about holding back on saying stuff like that. But the hint is about doing what I had loved to do when I was younger, but stopped because of some weird sense of piety and decorum. (Long story.) But here's what I used to do: fishing, crawling in and out of caves, mushroom hunting, collecting invertebrates off the shore of the Florida Keys, biking before the sun comes up, snaking, and taking photos of nature and cityscape scenes. There's this one building I see almost everyday on my way to the train station. It has a wall with a faded and pealing brownish hue. The fade is uneven so I've noticed a shape, and each time I see it, I see Casper the Friendly Ghost, which just happens to have two "eyes," perfect circles apparently meant for drainage pipes but set exactly where ghost eyes would be. Now that's a project for me to photograph. Years ago, I would have stopped traffic to get that shot, and I'm sure the rush-hour drivers would have shared with me their urban manners.