confessions of a reformed tourist
One might decide to focus on the damage.
Conclude this house failed to weather the storm.
I choose to focus on the fact that it’s still standing.
Unconquered.
*
Hurricane Ivan hit Grenada in 2004.
90% of the buildings on the island lost their roofs.
By 2008 most had been repaired or rebuilt, but some, like this one, were abandoned.
Standing here I [...]
This photo of my mother was taken in 1970. She was a year out of college and teaching biology at Cathedral High School in New York City. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Living in Manhattan was an enormous challenge for her. That first winter, she tells me, she got herself a [...]
I remember thinking to myself as I took this, I’m never ever going to capture the way the sky actually looks. Or how bright the sun is.
And I didn’t.
But the photo is useful in spite of its limitations, because it helps me remember.
(Click here for a much larger version of the image.)
Women Who Run With the Wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes) was published in 1992 and my mom got it right away, which means I was 15 when I first read it. Which explains a lot about me and my particular brand of weird. I’m won’t even attempt here to distill the book into something neat and [...]
I dug up the original photo that I cropped into the Haile Selassie/Marcus Garvey header image. Looks different in context, doesn’t it? I’m not positive but I’m pretty sure that the gentleman in the lower center is Maurice Bishop.
This is one of my header images. The gentleman in the middle is Emperor Haile Selassie and to his right is Marcus Garvey. “Haile Selassie” is not the name he was given at birth, but rather a name that he adopted when he assumed the throne of Ethiopia. It means “Power of the Trinity”. His [...]
Behold the spice market in Saint George’s, Grenada. Click here for a much larger version of the photo. You’ll see that the background is simply drowning in wonderful detail. Just looking at those shelves makes me crave nutmeg, pepper, curry and cocoa. Though not simultaneously (ew) and not necessarily in that order.
I swear, every time I think he’s gotten as gorgeous as one human being can possibly get, he goes and kicks the bar higher. And yeah, I’m his mother so clearly I’m biased, but I also know empirical beauty when I see it.
Bean and I had a fantastic time taking these. My dad got him [...]
A while back I found out that Bean’s on the inside cover of the new edition of Grenada’s phone book. Today, I finally got a copy.
And here’s the inside cover. This photo was taken in front of his school on Grenadian Independence Day. The holiday is why they’re all dressed in their “national colours”. I [...]
Grand Anse Beach. This is one of my all-time favorite photos of me and Bean. I’ve probably posted it before, and I’ll probably post it again. On days like today, when there’s been snow on the ground for weeks and it’s so cold that I can’t walk barefoot inside my own house because the floor [...]