Looking Back And Comparing, Again

I like to think of it as my 'Lost Summer", 1983. I shopuld have graduated Truman High school in the Bronx but was bounced out in march of that year instead. Things at home weren't going much better.

Between my parents and I we saved about $800 for college tuition. Looking back it's no wonder why my father didn't want to give me $16 to take an SAT exam or $25 for a college application. then again it was confusing to me since they bought a new car that year and were preparing to move from the Bronx to the suburban New Jersey.

I asked my father to change the status of the savings account that he had custody so I could take money out of it; this he did willingly and I spend very quickly. I bought some darkroom equipment, a second used Canon F-1 body and lots of drugs and booze.

Ronald Reagan was president then and the economy was terrible. Scholarship money and grants were drying up and there weren't many jobs to be had either. I had a string of jobs with companies that were already in the process of closing shop. Between march and September that year I might have had a half-dozen different jobs, none lasting more than a few weeks. There was plenty of time to take photographs, smoke pot, drink cheap beer and hang out.

Nearly 25 years later and living a lifestyle that disguises much of the past, my wife and I often compare her difficult transition from her troubled family life to going to college to what I had done. She praises me for getting my stuff together, working my way through college to pay for tuition and ending up with a career that is doing fine by me so far. I on the other hand have a difficult time articulating what I had wanted and what I think I'm missing today.

There were no wild college times, no dorm living, no going away, no globe trotting in my youthful 20s, and there was none of the formal art school training I desired as a teenager.

In my thirties I've run into old classmates and met women I dated who went on to the very schools I wanted to apply to. None of them are photographers today and seem to have instead morphed their trained skills into other areas pulling in six digits designing web sites and such. And again, like many middle class folks, they too have a sphere of people, or a network they rely on from their college days for jobs, apartments, dating and party small talk. It's odd how my atypical upbringing, strange economic status, weird college education and white skin has earned a place for me stand silent with drink in hand adimst those with these networks.

What's most important here is that I was lucky to be able to shoot photographs both then and now. It seems as though it is as much of a coping mechanism then as it is now. So much so that i feel liek running out of the apartment right this instant to take picutres.