After the coffee at the cafe, reading, watching the baby nestled to the chest, looking at all the pretty shoes, the expensive dog, I walked back home on a different street, trying to find the thing I was looking for, the thing I wanted to capture on my camera, that thing that I didn’t know what it was yet.
When I don’t know what it is, it’s almost always on the ground.
A man – late 40s, great round orange-brown glasses, graying, unruly hair – who lives across the street in that creaky, beautiful loft building a block away from my own creaky, beautiful loft building, spotted me hunched over with my camera and came over to chat with me.
“Ah, you’re capturing urban nature,” he said. “These are some great trees, too.” He pointed up at the trees, which I had been obsessing over all week already, but they were so high, and now the flowers were falling off, onto the ground, where I was squatting on the street.
“I know, they’re beautiful,” I said. “But they were too high for what I wanted to do.”
“There are these new trees too, which the city dropped off the other day,” he said. He motioned across the street to some freshly planted trees in front of his building.
“I saw those too! I live up the block so I walk around looking…”
“Noticing the subtle changes,” he finished. And then he walked away.
I don’t think I will ever write an epic novel because the small moments in life – esoteric or not, though hopefully universal in their way – fill me with such great joy that they’re all I can think about most of the time. I could live one hundred years on one minute of great conversation a day. And crushed purple petals on city streets.
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My dear friend Maura Johnston, who is kicking an extraordinary amount of ass lately – take notice, aspiring writers, this is how you do it, you work very hard for a decade or so, and it pays off (and by paying off I mean then you get to do even more work, but maybe it becomes work you truly love), and if you don’t think you can wait that long, then I feel sorry for you, and also I don’t know if we can be friends – now contributes weekly to Morning Edition. You can listen to her most recent show here.
