The Times

We just started getting the Times again, which means, among other things, that we get a little death with our breakfast.

It is the juxtaposition of that death and these pastries (and then the dog climbing up on the table and eating them all...) that makes this morning rich.

Looking at my boyfriend I tell him he's aged since the last time I photographed him  with the times. "Thanks so  much" he says as I study the gray coming in at his temples.

"I wonder if you'll go bald" I said to him a few days back. "I wonder if you will" he said back. I wonder.

While savoring the beauty of my morning I thought about a little girl I know who's mother is schizophrenic and who I last saw in the caf at school with her dad. She had just been put in foster care and he was bringing her food that her mother made. A whole big cooked pink fish in tinfoil which she unwrapped and ate with her fingers just like that. There was a strange beauty in that moment too.

Then I got on to the business of eating and drinking coffee reading about Osama's sex life...! Who knew? Who would have thunk.

I guess everyone loves in their own way and finds beauty in all sorts of different things, Nina Simone was crooning away about it this morning...I think about it constantly.

Love and beauty and how they're so tangled up with repulsion and pain. 

One persons graffiti might be anthers Mona Lisa. One persons whole pink fish is anothers Raunauds pastry. One persons nemesis another persons savior. 

My boyfriend is aging, as am I, but in him I see the grey hairs coming in as markers of  time passing - time that I get to be with him. 

I look. He looks. He reads and I photograph and think about the girl and the fish. The dog ate the pastries but there's still coffee...and time, and love to be had and a vast beauty in all sorts of unexpected places if you care to look.