Walking

One day I was walking through The Bywater, which is really a neighborhood in the 9th Ward, when I ran headlong into fall. Quickly, I pressed the button and bam, bam, bam, I made a picture. I turned around and went to The Bank of Soul, an art gallery owned by an old friend of mine, another photographer who made a seminal portfolio of Black Masking Indians photographed with a large format camera in a studio. A couple of those pictures hang in The Smithsonian.

Jealous much, I am.

The Universe doesn’t seem to allow anything to happened with out balance, just like nature always seeks stasis. Two years ago or so he was falling down inside of his house a lot. He knew something was up so he took a cab to one of those emergency doctors that one of my doctor friends calls a “doc in a box.”

They took one look at him, took a quick a x-ray and sent him on his way via a medevac helicopter to a hospital that is located Uptown. There, it was determined that he had a huge non-cancerous tumor in his brain. Surgery was imperative. It was completed successfully, but it left him with encephalopathy. Water on the brain, if you will.

The doctors knew he needed more surgery so they implanted a shunt to drain the fluid.

A few months later, more surgery. This time it ‘t so good. He spent three months in a coma. Finally he woke up and was ready to leave the hospital. Oh no, the time in the coma meant that he had to learn to do simple things like walk, talk and eat. He spent another two months in physical therapy.

The day came. He went home. He spent months in bed. He lost his vision in one eye which his doctors said would return eventually. He toddles around sometimes taking a walk with help. And, this tumor wasn’t cancerous. Think about that. I can’t imagine what would have happened if it was.

This happy little fall picture brought me right back to that time.

Isn’t that something?