For Your Friends
Today there was a man building a line in the place in which I live. Also today, Saturday, October 16, 2010, I received the last of these four gifts. This man gave me this cross. I went inside and placed it around my neck and onto my bare chest as I excitedly re-listened to the story that he just told me. It was important to him to tell me and it was important to me to listen. He told me of a story that changed his life forever told to him by a man named Nelson.
My Middle Name Is Nelson
Listen above or listen here.
I came across this interview in a way I randomly come across things. It is of a man I know, who is the man in the photograph on that page and who once made an effort to get to know me when he didn’t have to. He looked at all my photographs of men in suits the first day we met, he then looked directly at me and said, “You are only allowed to shoot naked girls this week.” He knew what I needed and he made that happen. I took his portrait later that week and many years later, I mailed it to him. Now, just the other day, even more years later, I got to see that it meant enough to be where it is there. Also, another man I know just met him and I was passed along a story that I really needed that day too.
I was about to go away for many many days. Before I left I ordered something a friend made from the other side of the planet in a land I desperately want to visit. During those many days away, I was randomly told to spend all my nights in the same room, #214. Upon my return, this item was waiting for me all the way from that land so far away.
There are only 300 and mine is #214.
A friend asked me to photograph something really important to him. All I asked for was a way to get there, a way to get around once there and a place to stay. He agreed. Then I made him the best photographs I could. When his mother saw what I had made with all my might, she was moved and told me to choose one of her late husband’s photographs to have printed just for me. I didn’t have to think much, I knew which photograph by this man I wish I had met that I wanted. How it was made is a good story.
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Sometimes, no one but me can see just what I can, just how I do, just like you.