Capture Radiance

Hi readers! This is what I imagine might be the first section of the memoir. Thanks for all your reading, comments, and great suggestions.

I used to get paid to take pictures of accidents for a newspaper and later I realized I was an accident and started taking pictures of myself. The accident photographs, the first batch, that I got paid for, well, they weren't very good. I said I could use a camera in the interview which turned out to be a lie. I could lie with the confidence of one who really needed a job. I had to learn to operate an ancient Mac computer with all those computer-friendly icons. About being user-friendly, that was something I knew. When people touched me, I stayed quiet. To speak of a thing was to make it true.

The camera I used weighed heavy around my neck, its weight pushing my neck down, a feeling I was used to a tad bit more than I wanted to be. I liked pushing the camera's button, liked being in the middle of what passed for action in our own small town. Once I took pictures of firecrackers standing in Possum Kingdom Lake. My friend Angela Dawn drove us there and as we waded into the water, a small snake swam by. Tiny by most standards, but still there. And I knew from my mother, the smaller ones were more dangerous as their venom had not dispersed throughout their body. I snapped many pictures that night -- almost all of them turned out completely black. I realized how hard it is to capture radiance. One turned out okay; it looked like a magical dandelion in the sky and it ran on the front page of the Mineral Wells Index. That's when I knew a comforting and horrible truth -- it only takes one thing to make a big difference.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"The past is what you remember, imagine yourself to remember, convince yourself to remember, or pretend to remember." Harold Pinter

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: The Dark Knight

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Thursday!