Here’s the difference. Jeff logs on and sends me a dozen photos of their recent trip: sunsets, mountains, brick buildings, train stations and family members. Karen logs on and sends me what she’s titled as “Five Great Photos,” and they are all of her son who lives in Spain.

Reminds me some of Diane and most mother’s I know. I can take a photo worthy of the greatest portrait photographer of all time (Of course I can’t, but follow my point here) , and if you can’t see both ears – as in a full smiley face – it’s not going in the family album.

Here’s the difference. Jeff logs on and sends me a dozen photos of their recent trip: sunsets, mountains, brick buildings, train stations and family members. Karen logs on and sends me what she’s titled as “Five Great Photos,” and they are all of her son who lives in Spain.

Reminds me some of Diane and most mother’s I know. I can take a photo worthy of the greatest portrait photographer of all time (Of course I can’t, but follow my point here) , and if you can’t see both ears – as in a full smiley face – it’s not going in the family album.

I might have a theme here. First BirdBrain’s house and now Adam and Tricia’s. The moral might be, don’t hire me to do work, or if you see me with my black backpack, lock your door.

Adam wondered why there are no photos of the part of his house I’m most familiar with – the inside of their refrigerator.

This photo goes with the pig picture – I’m hoping there will be more of Jeffro and Karen’s trip to Spain to see their first born.

Future Jamon.

In which Adam runs afoul of Mike’s proclivity for intellectual bigotry

A landscape lighting project downtown acquired new dimensions when the building architects (not the landscape architects who got me involved in the first place) became interested in how one might light the building to enhance its features from afar. One of its salient details is the cruciform corner columns, which straddle the octagonal lobby volume, beginning as “plus signs” for three stories before merging with the upper square tower volume for the next 40 stories (effectively losing two sides into the façade). The building thus has four “innie” corners all the way to the roof, and we decide to uplight one of these as a test.

Even the narrowest-beam spotlight I could scrounge only carried a dozen floors or so – clear that we’d never reach the roofline from the ground, we decided to see what a similar spotlight at the roof would do aimed down (new contract with a new client). After a quick reconnoiter on a crackerjack Indian summer January evening, I came back on a less friendly night to actually test it out.

The views from the 42-floor mechanical penthouse parapet floor are spectacular – that I never brought my camera up there should be simply condemned up front then ignored … The night of the test, a front was coming in. Upriver along the Charles to the west was a spectacular band of peach being squeezed out of the sky by the descending grey, and chill wind buffeted us. The building supervisor assigned someone to assist and secure me — in deference to blog anonymity, I’ll call him MG (for “maintenance guy”), but his actual name evokes the adjectives “Mighty” and “Young” for anyone versed in 50’s science fiction.

30-something, short and stocky, MG’s got a pugnacious but friendly face, skewed by a notable growth on the bridge of his nose, and a pleasant, can-do attitude. We set off from the loading dock for the elevators with a cheerful, “Let’s get up there, brother!” Since I’d be hoisting a 20 lb. light out over 42 stories on a 10’ piece of Unistrut, both the gear and I needed to be tied off so neither could go over the edge (not very far over, anyway … ). Which involved MG coaching me into how to don an OSHA harness (“Let me show you this, then, brother”), me squeezing my above-average height and weight into a difficult-to-adjust rig set up for someone smaller and shorter, and then his tying me and the gear off to the window washing davits once in position (“Feels tight — you good, brother?”).

So I’m oddly trussed up, standing on a scaffold with the light in place, me and it roped to the roof, and we’re gazing out on the impressive city skyline view waiting for darkness to fall, and I’m wondering what MG and I can find to talk about — other than his fondness for the epithet, “Brother”, the lack of circulation in my legs, and my envy of his thermal coveralls … As far as I know, his life is all building maintenance – boilers and chillers, ducts and valves, probably brawling on weekends. I don’t want a Young Frankenstein, “What hump?” moment, so I’m not going to ask about his nose (but I do ponder his dating difficulties some … ), and I’m determined to avoid cars, assuming he’s a protectionist Ram pickup guy, me having driven there in a Toyota Matrix (Asian wagon).

But as topics come and go, I find myself explaining my job and lamp and fixture technology in more and more detail to a guy who knows more about electricity than me, musing on the state of Boston commercial real estate with someone who works in several major buildings and knows both some history and what’s “in the pipeline”, debating smart phones with much more of a power-user than I’ll ever be, and comparing kids to grandkids. Yes, he has a wife and children ….

Turns out he owns the Volvo I’m parked behind, and while beer figures in our chitchat for awhile, he’s a reader, and an avid watcher of nature channels – not the Crocodile Hunter (R.I.P.), but Nova, National Geographic, etc. – and we talk evolution, space travel, lunar colonization, LED lighting, nanotechnology, Homeland Security, urban flight, you name it. While the architects are tromping all over Boston seeking various vantage points to evaluate the effect (and while our core temperatures plummet), MG and I are finding easy conversation on all manner of topics. All liberally punctuated with “brother”, which has gone from dubiously ironic to an honorific I feel I don’t deserve.

We passed a fine evening, and once we were done he demonstrated equally unexpected tactful grace to go with his erudition. After helping me down from the scaffold, he said he’d set about untying things if I wanted to get out of the harness. Not thinking past the beckoning warmth of the open mechanical bay door, I slung the Unistrut with its hyper-secured light over my shoulder and headed for the lit doorway — when I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unseen force. The rope tied to the D-ring of my harness. One of the things he had to untie was me …

Never said a word about it.

Counting the three deaths today, there has now been 104 murders in philly so far this year. To put in perspective, I believe there were 63 in Boston in all of last year.

Me: What should I title it?

Diane: How about Homeless?

Me: Isn’t that too ham-handed? I don’t want people feeling sorry for me.

Diane: Then don’t post it.

Me: But I want my words back on the blog, and I want people to know why there haven’t been any.

Diane: Then post it.

*******************

Dear Helen,

I’m behind. I should have written earlier. Maybe I’d be sleeping now.

I understood your death. I knew it was coming, I didn’t know how I’d react, but your perpetually bright smile helped me cope. Mack’s demise has unhinged me. Most days I know who I am, but some days I feel lost, and many nights I feel myself thrashing about. I wish he’d lived longer than six months after you died, I wish I’d intervened to stop his surgery, I wish my last memories of my father were not of him lying in bed, eyes closed, exercising the only parts he could still move, his hands.

Wednesday night I dreamed I couldn’t find my way home. I was in a strange city and all streets were dead ends. Anxious, I’d wake myself up, but go right back to the same city, and the same struggles. I’ve had these dreams before. Wander, wander, wander, look around, not knowing where I am, or really, even where home is. This time I got mad and said to myself, “I know where to go.” I grabbed my shopping cart and walked through dark, empty streets until I came to a highway without cars. I sensed this was a place I shouldn’t be, where I might be arrested, but I picked my cart up, hoisted it overhead, and continued to walk over the lanes, past high fences and down to a broad building with a loading dock. The concrete platform was too high, I’d made one wrong decision, but I heard a man’s voice that said, “Over here.” Over “there” was easy entry to the building and I walked in that direction with my cart.

I remember your dreams. You loved dreams. Yours were colorful and intricate and populated with people, and you looked to that PBS guy for help interpreting them. What was his name, the guy Mack derided, who liked James Joyce and wrote about symbols and myth and…Joseph Campbell, that’s him.

Thursday night, as if to ward off more wander-in-the-dark dreams, I cooked garlic toast with dinner. I crushed four fresh cloves, soaked them in olive oil and slathered the mixture on sour dough bread, which I then browned under the broiler. It was so strong it bit back. The toast reminded me of Karen’s potato soup which she cooks with five heads of garlic.

I often think of shopping with you at Idylwilde, of how you’d marvel at their exotic produce – like a child your eyes sparkled at new and different – and I still have the garlic cooker you and I bought. Anyway, Karen’s soup made her whole house smell like a crushed garlic clove, but it was about half as intense as my toast. Did she ever make it for you?

The point of my wandering letter is I need help. I need more rest, I need to feel up to this task, I need to feel not so alone. I know you don’t have the answers, you didn’t when you were alive, but you did always listen.

Anyway, as Diane and I were driving into Cambridge yesterday, we rounded the rotary near the BU bridge and Diane whispered, “There you are.” I thought she was talking about the driver in front of us, and I said, “You mean the curly-headed guy?” “No”, she answered, pointing to the green grass near the overpass, “The homeless man sitting next to his shopping cart.”

Usually the roar of the propane catches my attention, but this morning the Counting Crows and our closed windows sealed off the sound. Luckily I glanced out the back just as they were floating by.

I wasn’t the official photographer so I got to lurk in the background and have fun, which is good, because I ended up with about two pictures of the boy. More photos of people no one knows.

I wasn’t the official photographer so I got to lurk in the background and have fun, which is good, because I ended up with about two pictures of the boy. More photos of people no one knows.