Time Passages

You are looking at a slightly renewed New Mexican picture. Eastern New Mexico, that is east of the Sandias and Sangre de Cristo Mountains, looks nothing like the west which is high desert. In the east, the scenery is all grass and farm lands as the state reaches into western Colorado, which doesn’t look anything like the mountainous east which is what you are thinking about.

And, speaking about thinking about…

I’ve been awakening with the strangest thoughts, not from my usually weird dreams, but completely independent. They are my first thoughts of the day. They aren’t bad, but they are strange.

I wake up thinking about all the people I used to know but have all but been forgotten by me now. I’m not talking about lost friends who are missing because of distance, time or emotions. I’m talking about everybody. Photography staffs, newsroom staffs, neighbors, schoolmates at all levels of education, and others that may have passed through my life.

I’m not exactly sure how this started except that I have been talking to an old, old friend of mine that I really haven’t spoken to since 1980. Nothing happened to the relationship. I just moved across the country in the days before instantaneous communication could be had at almost every level.

She friended me on Facebook and mostly didn’t talk much. But, one day she asked me about a picture I posted and we began to chat a little. Did I know this person? Or, that person? We knew a lot of people in common although we didn’t usually run in the same circles even though we are friends. I’m sorry to say that alot of those folks have wandered off the planet. It’s always great catching up after 30 or 40 years and learning things you didn’t want to know.

I’m not really sure that our conversations are the genesis of my early morning thoughts but I’m not big on coincidences.

Unfortunately, this isn’t like a dream. I don’t wake thinking it was good to see those folks again because I never saw them.

Thinking about them isn’t the same thing.