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David Buchholz
A Week to Remember. First, thanks and gratitude, especially to Sandy, Laura, Larry, Gail, and to all who made last weekend such a warm and welcoming affair. Gail made me come. She corralled Larry Klein into accepting a two-legged creature to keep company with Donny and Marie, his four-legged ones. I had no choice. And I'm grateful I didn't. So another thank you to Gail for that. I hosted a Bay Area party for the WHHS Class of '64 several years ago and was delighted to see so many classmates then. Gail, Jadyne, and I have become wonderful friends since then, and I think she actually prefers Jadyne's company to mine, but that's another story.
I expected a four-way. (Onions, not beans). I didn't expect to be remembered by so many, but it was as if we were back in the hallowed halls fifty-nine years ago, grateful that Richared Stivers was no longer pushing me into lockers. I'm also grateful for Jon Marx, whose company I've come to enjoy so much over the past few years, for his delightful daughter, Tina, for discovering that other people cry at magic tricks, for laughing at Ricky Steiner's Crosley Field parking lot shenanigans, for Gail's heartwarming story of a father who gave up the possibility of being governor of Kentucky so that she could get the education that only Walnut (I'm trying the shorter version) could provide, for knowing that since we were students inclusiveness has replaced the Greeks, for discovering that even without Calculus I've managed to stumble through life, grateful to Char Damron and Pam Steuve (sp?) for showing so much interest in my imagery, comforted by learning that for all the places in the world Ashley has been, he hasn't hiked the Himalayas, and most of all, appreciating Gene Stern's incredible life story. Added together in so few hours, the benefit of all that I discovered at a place I was initially indifferent to be, was rewarding in ways I'm trying to express in these few words.
And yes, I took a few images. I told Steve Collett that it's a compulsion. I can't not take photographs. I'm posting about forty of them from Skyline and the Talk Around at WHHS. They were meant to be just candids, but I sat at the Talk Around and did what I've always done—study faces. These are not portraits. They reveal in a sixtieth of a second who you were at one point last weekend. They're on my website for now. Each of you gets your own page. They can be edited, removed, colored, used to wrap fish, whatever, even transferred to the website.
The reunion was part of a driving trip that Jadyne and I took from Kensington to No Name, Colorado, where her brother lives. No Name is in the eastern part of the eight mile Glenwood Canyon, through which Interstate 70 accompanies the Colorado River and the tracks that carry coal trains, a magnificent part of the West. The last photographs are from that part of the trip. (I snuck them at the end so you'll have to look. You'll recognize the compulsion).
In one touching footnote I photographed a disabled man and his dog at the train station. His caregiver drove him from Carbondale to Glenwood Springs. Amtrak's Zephyr passes through Glenwood Springs, and fifteen members of his family were on the train. When it stopped they all ran to his wheelchair and hugged him. Ten minutes later they were gone.
The one image that I deleted too early was from Lovelock, Nevada, the correctional institution where OJ was incarcerated. It is Gail's custom, summer or winter, to drive by the prison, roll down the windows, raise a middle finger, call me on the phone, and yell "You know you killed them, you MF!" I do the same. It's our own GPS location service.
http://www.davidkbuchholz.com/reunion
Let's do it again tomorrow.
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