My Future Yesterday

A Memoir

Paper: Agfa Matte
Camera: SLR X700 Minolta 35 mm
November 1983

In an instant not too unlike September 11, 2001, I witnessed history materialize through my camera's eye.  It was the contrast of my childhood images and those same images plaguing my adulthood right now.  I couldn't for a long time figure out what was missing until today.

As best as I can remember, I was on the way to a wedding.  I detoured to the place of my childhood to see what had taken my breath away so very long ago.

It was a perfect day.  Sweet and awesome in every way.  Not too hot; not too cold: In fact it was so perfect that even the sidewalk seemed to have taken to tearful joy making, every moment so happy that I could virtually pop, glisten, covered with footery walking in every direction, and my future mirrored the scape of the towers above me.  Oh, God.  I looked up and nearly rolled off my dad's back.

I remember thinking that Jack in "the Beanstalk" didn't have it so good.  When he looked up, he saw Forever ascending up into the clouds and what a climb that must have.  But I saw myself on a privileged steed watching "The Jetson's" on an elevator flying me up to see for myself the spectacle of the city below.

"Put me down, Daddy, right now," I said.  I had become Super Photographer Kiddo, riding into the 80's on a snowy cloud.  Not a care in the world except to get my precious images, and I did, as you see here.

How that relates to my adulthood today?  As I look at the straight and narrow mass that once damned the sky of New York, making targets of us all, and that these Twin Towers did not fall as cartoons in my head.  They fell as a mark in my life that had also altered and amassed the world in a mystifying change all with one common denominator: Fear.

I look at these photos today, remembering my expectations and realizing that I could never have imagined that Super Kiddo would come back to remind me of just how much I've lost in my future today.  For that reason, I say Godspeed to those who became part of America's legacy into the 21st century, the victims of 9/11.  May we learn from our mistakes.