C'est Moi

       

                                                                         
                                                                       
So many people have told me they've been on the blog and were disappointed when they went onto the profile section and found nothing.  I have tried to rectify this by putting in a picture and a few words of explanation about myself, but the image was quite small, and they only allow you space for one.  How can they expect a photographer to explain himself within such limiting constraints.

So this is me, on the road.  During this time, Jackie  (who took the two above pictures and the bottom one) and I were working our way along a section of Route 66 around the area of Oatman, Arizona, not too far from Needles, on the California border,  close to the beginning of the Mojave desert we were soon to enter.

As I have said before, the Interstate Highway system is a wonderful innovation.  It allows you to travel throughout the United States and never get to see America.  We almost always take the back roads, and these days the quintessential back road through the USA has to be Route 66.  The end of a good day of taking pictures, and I am dry, dusty, and ready for a beer or three.

So that's what I like to think I look like. 

But who am I.  

My grandmother had three sisters, the youngest one, and sadly, the first to die was Mildred, wife of Uncle Artie and mother of Martin and Martha, paragons of virtue and good behavior, not to mention academic excellence against whom I was often measured.  They were the bane of my existence with my mother often musing aloud about why her ADD son couldn't be more like them.  As it turns out, its just as well that I didn't, but that's another story for another time.

My Aunt Mildred was a school teacher in the NYC school system, and in addition to passing along hand me down underwear and things from Martin, she gave us old school books, mostly elementary school reading books for English class.  The books mostly dated from the 1930's and 40's and by the 50's, they were antiquated and were being retired and disposed of.  Not being much of a reader, I thumbed through the books, amused by the old fashioned pictures, but little else.

But what did catch my eye and excite my imagination were the stamped imprints on the back of the front cover of the books, where the annual recipient would write the date, Sept. 1938, their name, James Dolan, and their classroom.  I found myself mesmerized by the names and dates and penmanship and wondering who those kids were and what happened to them.  I would return over and over to the lists of names  and dates, trying to conjure up an image and context for these early inhabitants of dingy Manhattan apartments, inhabiting stoops and sidewalks, playing stickball and hopscotch, running wild in the back streets of my imagination.  I still search them out in abandoned buildings, in the smells of old apartment houses and among the old overcoats huddled on park benches in forgotten parks along 11th avenue. But they are becoming harder to find.

This was not what Aunt Mildred had in mind when she passed the books along, but all was not lost.  My first foray into the world of urban archeology that later became a passion I continue to pursue, collecting data and artifacts with my camera.  So begins a profile...

                                               

                                           There is a balding fag I know

                                           with nothing but a bulging

                                           paper  shopping bag between him

                                           and a life of undistinguished

                                           dereliction...

                                           Sometimes I stop

                                           and look through that

                                           sack of memories I carry

                                           and remember the distain

                                           I once felt

                                           for the schmattta ladies who

                                           blossomed like potted plants

                                           along Fifth Avenue.

                                                                    Pablo 

Addendum 7/10/15:

Bought a good scanner a few weeks ago and have started going through the archives and scanning this and that and some old photos of me here and there and this seems to be as good a place as any to put them.  The first two seem to be from my earlier hobo days when I was still riding the rails.

Boxcar Pablo somewhere near Stowe, Vermont.  After all there years, I can still remember this photo being taken.

Me and Nora racing for the train from Ottawa to Moncton N.B. where we would make our way to Cape Tormentine to catch the ferry to PEI.

Me, taken by Jackie somewhere in New Mexico during my Edward Weston/Signs of Life in Death Valley and the American Southwest phase, and yes, that is a light meter hanging around my neck.  Don't really know why, since I never use one.

                                                                     Pablo