Quietly, this Christmas

Lucky Kitty and his Christmas Tree

Most Decembers I get caught up in it all, full of raucous joy, willing and able to get all jacked up on Christmas.  This year for a lot of reasons I’m way behind the curve, and here it is the night before Christmas Eve.  Still, though Christmas hasn’t been coming out of me, it does seem like it has tried to get into me.  Some things were on the small side of wonder  like my cat Lucky and the Christmas tree.  I swear he adores the tree.  Late at night he walks around it, smelling the branches and looking at the lights and ornaments.  He never plays with the ornaments,  just walks around the tree, looks, changes his viewing angle and then looks some more.  Whereas most of the family just accepts the tree after the first couple of nights, Lucky is smitten. Such a simple thing, yet it warms my heart.

I’m usually one to be grateful, understanding how blessed I am, how blessed my family is.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been less than that this month.  Until a chance walk to the elevators at our office knocked me back to my senses.  Some of the good people I work with set up a Christmas tree that was decorated that morning with dozens of cards containing the Christmas wishes of  underprivileged children. If people wanted to they could take one of these cards and fulfill a child’s wish.  I walked by at 9 a.m. on the way out to a shoot and the tree was full.  When I came back at 11 a.m. there were just a few left.  Made me really proud of my fellow employees at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  As I walked by a man and a woman  were taking these last cards.  They were talking as I walked by and I overheard the woman, a really nice person whom I’ll call Winter, say ” This is SO important.  When I was a kid I stood in line at the Toys for Tots giveaways and we all got to pick one toy for Christmas. We were so thankful.”  I got the feeling that I was with the ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Present at the same time.  Funny thing is, she had her back to me as I walked by her and I don’t think she knew that I was even there, yet her story affected me deeply.  Thank you Winter, for waking me the hell up and knocking my heart back into the right place.

Then there’s Tommy.  My wife is a friend of Tommy’s mom so I hear a lot of stories about him.  Very simple things are difficult for Tommy, things that you and I take for granted.  He has a mental struggle with daily life that few of us can comprehend.  A couple of days ago I heard something about Tommy I didn’t know:  Tommy is twenty-one years old.  He still believes in the guy with the reindeer.  I have a picture in my mind of Tommy fighting sleep on Christmas Eve as he waits for Santa.  That is so profoundly beautiful to me.

So Lucky, Winter, Tommy, thank you.  For wonder, and gratitude, and beauty.  Merry Christmas

 

 

Fandom

I’m not really sure if we can pinpoint the moment we became fans of this or that sports team.  I can for a fact, however, pinpoint the first time in my young life when I saw a fan.  And seeing is usually what happens before becoming.  Like most first-graders, my involvement with balls was entirely based upon the throwing, catching, and mostly dropping of them.  The  television of that time interested me for a brief period of Saturday morning cartoons and that was about it.  After my weekly dose of cartoons on a particular autumn Saturday was over, an odd thing happened.  My mother walked in the room, changed the channel and asked if I would watch a football game with her.  This perked my ears up as my mother was and is a woman of very few requests.  Questions arose in my mind as to why in the world I would want to watch other people at play when it was a perfectly good day to be playing myself.  Still, knowing that this hardworking woman both fed and clothed me, and also reputedly had a direct line to Santa’s ear gave me pause. So, I sat down and proceeded to watch my first televised football game.  I should mention at this point that although this incident took place in Berwyn, Illinois, my big immediate and extended family are from a “blink your eye and you’ll pass it” town in Alabama.  My young mind on that day had no idea that I was by birth, traditon, and family geography a future practicioner of two separate but not exclusive religions, one that fervently followed Jesus, and another that just as fervently followed the University of Alabama Crimson Tide Football Team.  My mother sat in her chair quiet and tense, hands clasped, white-knuckled.  She is mostly a quiet and reserved woman, and that is the way she was that day.  Until one of those boys in crimson threw the ball to another boy in crimson who started to streak down the field.  Then she jumped straight out of her chair screaming at the top of her lungs ” COME ON ‘BAMA, COME ON ‘BAMA! ROLL TIDE, ROLL! “  She jumped up and down stomping her feet until that boy reached the end zone and then she jumped and screamed some more, red faced, savage.  Scared the living daylights out of me. I’m fairly certain that I suddenly had a little extra in my tightie-whities.  I jumped out of my chair and backed away from this person who fifteen minutes before had been my kind and caring mother.  She let out a long whoosh of breath, recovered her composure and then looked at me standing there pale and wide-eyed.  She smiled and said ” It’s okay honey, mama just gets excited when the Tide scores a touchdown.” I became dimly aware that after that day I would be an Alabama fan just like my mama.

Move ahead a few more decades than I’d like to admit and I’m at Lambeau Field photographing Packers fans while they are tailgating.  Green and Gold everywhere, smiles, and a  whole lot of ” ‘hoopin’ ‘n hollerin’ ” as my grandfather would say.  Their excitement gets me thinking about my mother as a fan way back then, and I’m seeing that same fervor in all the fans here.  I’m wondering if they can remember when they first became fans like I can.  Although the weather is quite different, Wisconsin still has always reminded me of Alabama: pines and hills, waters full of fish, kindhearted people, and football fans.  I can tell you that the two states are tied in a dead heat in terms of how many people you see wearing their teams colors on any given day.  And like my mama would tell you, before they wore Green and Gold, a few of the Packer boys wore Crimson and White.  Their names are Paul Ott Caruth, Larry Lauer, Russ Mosley, Rebel Steiner, George Teague, and current Packers strong safety Charlie Peprah.  Oh, yeah, and a couple of other guys who did okay in Green and Gold: Don Hutson and Bart Starr.

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The National on National

This falls in the you gotta be kidding department.  Just as compass needles point to magnetic north, my own personal compass needle  swerves toward coffee shops.  I need caffeine.  Lots and lots of caffeine.  Although not a coffee snob, the caffeine I like best is served at places with good window light, an eclectic crowd and that hard to define but all important good cafe mojo.  I keep mental notes on places I drive by, hoping to get a chance to stop in, get a good cup of coffee and maybe some conversation.  Almost always I forget the names of these places, remembering instead the color of the paint I see through the windows or the way a door looked.  Sometimes it takes me a while to be in the right place at the right time with the right fifteen minutes on my hands before I get a chance to stop by one of these likely-looking places.  That’s how it was with a likely-looking  cafe on National Avenue in Milwaukee.  I’ve passed it a bunch of times to and from the office, each time telling myself that I need to stop in for a coffee.  Even though it is maybe a mile from the office, somehow I’ve managed to not stop and walk in during the year or so since I noticed it was there.  That changed last week when I got an assignment to shoot the new owner of a cafe on National.  Turns out that it is the place I’ve been wanting to visit.  Most cafes and coffee shops are by nature interesting places, but the National Cafe on National Avenue in Milwaukee not only has an interesting name, but also an interesting story.  Turns out that the new owner, Nell Benton, bought the cafe for a cool hundred bucks. With a couple of intriguing strings attached.  Read more about it in the January/February issue of Wisconsin Trails.  You can check out the National Cafe here: http://www.nationaleats.com/

Rob Kirkum’s Ghoulhouse

Most Halloween tales take  place on a dark and stormy night.  This one takes place on a dark and stormy afternoon.  I was driving down the highway when I looked off to my right and saw dozens of people outside of a house standing  and sitting in the wind and rain.  Photographers are curious by nature, and I’m no exception.  Why would people be outside in weather as bad as this?  I got off the highway, went up the road to the house and pulled over.  All those people standing and sitting in the wind and rain? Maybe they were people at some time or other.  Before they turned into ghouls and ghosts, vampires, werewolves and assorted other scary creatures that turn up on Rob Kirkum’s lawn around Halloween time.  Rob’s friends can be seen at 13826 Braun Road,  near the intersection of Braun Road and South Sylvania Avenue, a little bit north of Apple Holler.

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Precious Cargo

In  brightness of youth they traveled to far-off lands, fought for those whose freedom was taken, fought for a freedom theirs, and fought to make sure there was a freedom for those yet to be.  Take a little minute and imagine dropping your whole life right now to go off across an ocean and fight and maybe not come back.  That was the reality for the World War II veterans from Wisconsin that I photographed returning home from the Stars & Stripes Honor Flight on October 8th to Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee. The Honor Flights take veterans to see their war memorial in Washington D.C., something that a lot of them could otherwise not do because of physical or financial reasons.  The Honor Flights are concentrating on the World War II veterans right now as we are losing about 1,000 of them every day.  As time moves on, the flights will take up the veterans of Korea and Vietnam.

 

To see this event unfold was one of my most rewarding moments as a photographer, and one of my most humbling as an American.  Thousands of people were there beforehand to take a place and make a sign to welcome back their friend or family member.  Many held aged pictures made when these men were in their youth, posing for a photograph in their uniform.  To be there was to see and hear stories, to behold love, and to feel joy.  I got to laugh with Virginia Driesen as she told me about her husband Brad’s first USAF landing that took place in a field rather than on the intended runway.

Virginia and Brad Driesen

I got to meet the Zadra family and take Max Zadra’s picture as he stood waiting in his Grandfather Joe’s uniform.  Master Sgt. Joe Zadra fought at the Battle of the Bulge and during the war he had intelligence maps sewn in the lining of the coat that  his thirteen year-old grandson Max is wearing below.

Max Zadra in Grandpa Joe's uniform

When the Honor Flights came in and the veterans walked and rolled down the aisle, applause shook the terminal and the emotion of it shook me. To see the happiness on the faces of the vets as they saw the giant crowd, to watch little kids reaching out to shake their hands, to see some of them trying to hold back tears, to feel the warmth of a vets hand as he thanked me for taking his picture…well, I’d like to tell you that I’m a professional observer, that like my journalistic colleagues I can be cool and detached from the emotion of events I’m covering but that would be pulling both your legs and at least one of your arms.  I was emotional the whole time,  smiling and crying  big old happy tears, feeling so lucky to have been witness to it all.

Each veteran on the Honor Flight has a Guardian.  He or she is with their assigned veteran at all times, making sure they have whatever they need, whenever they need it.  The veterans wear blue jackets with the Honor Flight logo, the Guardians, red jackets.  On the Honor Flights the veterans entire trip is paid for.  The Guardian volunteers not only their time, but pays for their own flight.  A couple of weeks back I photographed Guardian Kathy Nevins and Melvin Schmidt, her veteran, at Melvin’s home.  We’re telling Kathy and Melvin’s Honor Flight stories in detail in Wisconsin Trails, so we wanted to get a portrait of them in a more controlled environment.  During the shoot Kathy kept using the word ” privilege ” in reference to her Honor Flight service.   As I left the parking lot at Mitchell Saturday night, I looked  in the rear view mirror and said one word to myself out loud:  privileged.  Thank you veterans, for making it so.

If you’d like to  see a schedule of Stars & Stripes Honor Flights in Wisconsin or to volunteer, go to http://starsandstripeshonorflight.org/  For other states, have a look at the Honor Flight national homepage: http://www.honorflight.org/

Have a look at a slideshow of the October 8th Stars & Stripes Honor Flight below and you can also look forward to learning more about the Honor Flight in the November/December issue of Wisconsin Trails coming out soon.

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Fall’s first day

Came quick, didn’t it?  Stands to reason that it will go quick, too.  Fall is my favorite season for a lot of reasons.  The obvious beauty of it, deep slumbers, football ( Roll Tide ), diminished bugs, and not least of all the putting on of longer, heavier clothes that mask my lack of restraint at summer barbeques.  As much as I love fall, photographically it is a tense time for me, as I worry a lot about ” the color “  in a way near to girls worrying about ” the wedding.” Where it’s going to be, is it going to be there when I get there, am I too early or too late?  My fall worry came early this year since our summer cooled off early and it seems that ” the color ” is coming faster than usual.  I’m trying to take a deep breath and think about the pleasure of it, the joy of making pictures in Wisconsin, the serenity of a woodland path and maybe even some late season camping with my wife and grandsons.  So even though today is just the first day of fall, get your calendar out and mark off some time for yourself in this prettiest, yet briefest of seasons.

Night of summers’ end

It wasn’t the cool/coldish wind that moved through last night,

Or the first sumacs already turned red.

Not the otherworldy glow of Friday night football,

Not the green corn browning as it readies for harvest.

It was August 25th, in Muskego,

The night I knew summer ended.

A carnival.

Popcorn-smelling, bright lights shining, two parts thrill

Stirred with one part sadness.

Kids near bursting a week before school,

Last of their summer freedom slipping away.

An old carnie sits at his stand, another season behind him.

 

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