NYC

Laura and I took a couple of great trips together. Very early we took a trip to South of the Border, the east coast headquarters for all things tacky. We had a mutual appreciation of low culture, which was good, considering out budgets made low culture much more accessible than high culture.

But, we did take one killer trip to New York City when my novel Nobody Gets the Girl was released. Phobos Books footed the bill for some train tickets, Orbit actually found reasonably priced rooms in a decent location, and when we got there, expecting to be broke within a day from the legendary high cost of living, we discovered that in the non-tourist parts of the city, prices were pretty much the same as they were in NC. So, we spent four days stuffing outselves with the best food we'd ever eaten in Little Italy and China Town, then walking it off by treking from one side of the island to the other in search of museums and other tourist stuff.

The one regret about the trip was that I was using my digital camera, but when we got home I discovered that somehow all the files had become corrupted. Of the hundred or so photo's I'd snapped, only one was even moderately recognizable--a photo I'd snapped of the two of us in a mirrored building, with a busy street scene behind us. The camera had only saved blue and red pixels, no green, so the color was completely messed up, and it had also only saved every other line of the photo, so the original was full of thin blank lines. Fortunately, I'm pretty good with photoshop, so a few paint filters and a bit of color restoration produced a photo that had a soft, watercolor feel to it, hazy as a memory, but still interesting in the details that emerge as I study it. For instance, is it my imagination or does Laura have exactly the same smile as the Mona Lisa?

So, I only had one hazy, off color record of the trip--until fellow Phobos author and Odyssey grad Matt Rotundo came to the rescue recently with a second photo, this taken in Sandra Schulberg's apartment on Halloween, I think. I've spent the evening in a frustrating trip between three stores tonight in search of a function photo kiosk to print the photos, but have returned home, finally, with pictures in hand. I've never in my life assembled a photo album, but I'm going to put one together now. I wish I'd printed out all these photos while Laura was still around to look at them with me... but, then again, when she was around, I wasn't interested in looking at photos. I could look at her.

I've never been the sort of person to sit around dwelling in memory. Other people I know remember the names of their teachers from elementary school. I can't even remember teachers from High School. And I'm not talking about not remembering their names--I have no memory at all of who I might have encountered back then. The VCR of my mind can only record about ten years before it starts overwriting. I've never had memories I wanted so badly to hang onto before. Hopefully, the photo album will help me overcome forgetfulness circa 2016.