Courtyard By Marriott
Charlotteville
March 29, 2023
Above is the sign post for the Ding Dong fire department. When I was here in 2019, the sign post had a sign (which I of course took a photo of). Now, no sign. My intuitive conclusion was vandalism. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that conclusion involved a lot of assumptions that I had no way to check. And interestingly to me, those assumptions assumed negative behavior. Maybe the sign is being repainted? Maybe there's been a "rebranding" and they are changing the sign completely? Why did my mind immediately go to an explanation that involved something bad?
Today was a rare day for me in that I actually turned around and drove back about 30 minutes. When I was in Kingsbury, I spoke with the man who owned the garage full of goodies ( I was going to write "junk" but the reality is they were only someone else's junk -- taken together, they were treasures.). He asked what I had thought of Luling. I realized I had not given the town a decent visit, so I turned around a went to revisit. In that short period of time, the weather went from cloudy to sunny and changed the appearance of the area and made my photographs that much better. Another case of no wrong turns!
And another case of catching myself thinking ahead and not being in the moment. I was so "into the future" that I was not paying attention to what was around me in the present. I was going to get to Shiner at some point -- but in my head I was there already. I realize that I have the luxury of time most days. It's a gift I did not appreciate I would receive by retiring. What I mean is that I knew I would not have to go to work, but I did not appreciate that I would be able to really experience being present. I had spent so many years rushing around thinking -- more like focusing -- on what I had to do in the future that I spent so little time in the now.
It is fun to go back through these photos. What I see in these is that I really enjoy capturing unusual or at least fun things I see. I'm not big on taking photos of people -- I feel that is invading their privacy. I make an exception when I have talked with someone and I feel that a photo of them in their environment would be a great memory -- and then I ask for permission. When I left Charlottesville in 2019, I had no idea how much fun -- and how important it would be to me -- to take photos. In most cases my photos are "postcards;" rather pedestrian images of things I see. But at least sometimes, I think I have taken real photographs that capture something that others might not see, or might not see from the angle I see it.