The 2-1/2 Careers of Nancy Poore

 

            If you are reading this (as I hope you are) nearabout the 26^th of March, 2025, I am taking the opportunity to opine about the collective accomplishments of Nancy Moss Poore on what would have been her 99^th birthday. She was the youngest of five daughters, only senior to their solitary brother who would come a good bit later, born in Cumberland, Maryland. Cumberland is notable for being a major hub of the C&O Railroad, a final stop on the Underground Railroad, and once, in a carefully preserved building in a park, a temporary headquarters of George Washington.

 

            It was in this once-bustling western Maryland town that she grew up and, very likely because of the war, decided to go into nursing. Now that was an interesting time to go into that profession. My mother received her nursing degree from Frostburg State University, upon whose campus she never set a single foot.  You see, in those days, if you were a nursing student there, your classrooms, dormitories, cafeterias and laboratories where all contained on the grounds of Veterans Memorial Hospital. Except for very infrequent trips home, she literally lived, ate, worked, studied and slept at the hospital.

 

            It was also the practice at the time to have nurses do a rotation, much akin to the way doctors still do (and nurses may as well); she would work in an area of the hospital for a while and then move on to a different one, so on and so forth. This rotation led to an epiphany in our young Nurse Moss. She was working in the Emergency Room one afternoon when a man riding a motorcycle, while not being remotely properly dressed for riding a motorcycle came in. The gentleman, to use medical parlance, “did not have a good outcome”. It was that very moment that she decided that her path was in Obstetrics. As he herself put it, “I was tired of seeing people out of the world; I wanted to concentrate on bringing people in”.

 

            After graduation, she ended up working at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Two things of note about that: Firstly, her job bringing her to the Washington D.C. suburbs allowed her to cross paths eventually with one John Lee Poore, and without said connection, I wouldn’t be writing this. Second, it explains why having only lived in Washington D.C. proper until I was 28, I nonetheless have a Maryland birth certificate. Having long since abandoned her nursing career to become wife and mother, she still trusted the baby delivery services of her old stomping ground (especially at her “advanced” baby-having age of 45) and I was born in that very hospital.

 

            She only remained a nurse for just a few more years, eventually settling into the role of wife and mother. That was the job she would keep for exactly 30 years, my dad having died the day after their anniversary. My uncle Francis, late of a high up job at the World Bank, helped her with the transition from Harriet Homemaker to handling her own affairs. I can’t imagine the shock this must have been, on top of everything else. You’ve got to remember, this was not so far removed from the days when women couldn’t even have credit cards without their husband’s permission. I still remember being in Sears getting school clothes or whatever and my mother signing “Mrs. John Lee Poore”. It turns out, nobody should have worried. Mom inherited the stock Dad had in his company’s parent corporation and Dad’s life insurance policy and, armed with those, proved herself to be a natural financial whiz. Strictly amateur, mind you, and never giving others advice; just minding her own business and minding it just fine, thank you.

 

            Armchair financial wizardry aside, it was about this time that she embarked on her second “real” career. My elementary school had a small library that concentrated mostly if not exclusively on books for various teachers’ reading lists. Somewhere along the line, the school got some money from somewhere to make it more of a concern, and Mom decided that was just what she needed. It provided:

1.     An activity to take her out of herself. (A son’s side note here: Back then, depression was not diagnosed or even acknowledged like it is now. Looking back, in the years following my Dad’s death, oh boy, was she depressed.)

2.     As savvy as she was, I’m sure that Dad was making decent money and, without his paycheck coming in, I’m equally sure things were a little tight in the early post-Dad years.

3.     It allowed her to indulge her great love of books AND get paid for it.

 

So, dear old St. Ann’s got a new and revitalized library with an equally new and

revitalized librarian. Mom being Mom, she also took on the roles of school nurse and playground chaperone coordinator at no extra charge. She wore all of those hats well into her seventies, until the late, lamented Monsignor Awalt retired as pastor of St. Ann’s and the incoming pastor decided, fiscally speaking, that a dedicated librarian was surplus to requirements. That, as they say, was that. The church is still there, but the school only outlived Mom by five years.

 

            Mom glided into retirement gracefully however, turning her bedroom into a hoarder’s paradise of books and doting on her newest grandchildren. I would always be surprised at hearing new revelations about Mom from my own wife, who simply said “I know you’re busy at work; I talk to her every day.” I know my mother loved me; I have no doubt, but I still think she liked Cyndi better. Don’t get me wrong, we were about as close as a mother and son could be, but if you asked Mom who she’d want to go out to a used book sale with, I’m pretty sure it was her.

 

            I can’t say Mom was thrilled with the prospect of our moving to Maine, but she not only took it with her usual grace, but came through for us in a big way. Going back to her unofficial career for a moment, 2008 was the year we had some financial difficulties in the U.S., as you might recall. I was all set to cash in my 401k from Penn to take advantage of a loophole where underage folks would only pay a 10% penalty (instead of 20%) if the cash out was used to purchase one’s first home. When October 2008 hit, literally $40,000 of the value I had worked so hard for disappeared as if I had put it in a pile of cash and set it on fire. We were no longer able to afford the house in Maine we had fallen in love with. Unburdening myself to Mom after a Sunday dinner got me the response “let me talk to the man at my bank tomorrow and I’ll see if there’s anything we can do”. Let us just say that doors that were firmly slammed shut in my face were opened wide with red carpet when Mom did the knocking, and our Maine adventure was back on. We had told her before the 401k disaster that we were looking forward to her spending the summer with us in the new house and don’t think for a second she was going to let her Summer in New England fall through. That was the plan anyway…

 

            I had talked to her on a Sunday in March of 2009. In the midst of all the various updates, she mentioned she was going in for “a little procedure tomorrow, nothing to worry about”. In true Mom understatement, her “little procedure” was actually a quadruple bypass. My brother Dave called me to tell me she didn’t make it. I didn’t understand; I thought it was nothing. The doctor had told Dave that when he got her open, her heart tissue was the consistency of wet Kleenex; there was just nothing to save.

 

            She must’ve known; all of her final arrangements had all been taken care of already. Despite being married to a Catholic and working for decades for a Catholic school, she was a proud Lutheran to the end and as such, the three brothers gathered at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday, 2009. You wouldn’t think they would do a funeral on Easter Sunday, but the pastor there said that there could be no more fitting day. She is buried amongst the Catholics though, right next to dear old Dad.

 

            So, there is my ode to Mom, in honor of what would have been her last year of double digits. As I was not, at any time during the writing of this, struck by a bolt of lightning, I hope and assume I did her story justice.

If you could tell your younger self one thing… (Bonus Material!)

 

            Back in the Dark Ages of the early 1990’s, the reason MRI machines were sooo slow is because there was no digital anything at that point. They exposed your scans onto big sheets of film like x-rays, and needed to be processed accordingly. I was shuffling between various doctors and one of them (I don’t remember which) said “I don’t have time to get these over to Dr. So & So for your next appointment; you just want to hang on to them and bring them with you?” “No problem”, says I. Then I get to thinking, and I say to myself:

 

            “Self, you are an aspiring young photographer, you have a fully working wet darkroom in your mom’s basement (at that point, there was no other kind), and you have a box of Kodalith lithography film you bought for that one project in college and have never used again. Those MRIs aren’t going anywhere tonight…”

 

            So, I hobbled down to my darkroom and made copies of some of the grossest ones. One single frame has survived to this day, long after all the originals were destroyed. The left side (Note the T7 & T12 designations) shows my vertebrae. The dark grey line just to the right of that is my spinal cord, and the white stuff in between the cord and the bones and discs? Looks like someone sprayed whipped cream into my spine? I introduce you to Mr. Ependymoma.

 

            Oh, and to be aged 20 and only 140lbs. again…

 

 

 

If you could tell your younger self one thing…

 

            It’s often used as a trope in sci-fi or in very deep philosophical discussions… “if you could go back in time and change one thing.” We’ve all heard about going back to kill Hitler as a baby or to tell JFK keep the damn top up, but a friend of mine and I once got very specific: what would you tell you’re your younger self if you could. I had given that some thought. My knee-jerk reaction was to warn my younger self away from some women I’ve previously mentioned. Another was to issue a dire warning never to drink Jim Beam, though I’m sure at the relevant point, the then underage me would have ignored me. At that point, my friend broached a subject I wish he hadn’t, and a long bout of self-reflection started.

 

            I had been an athlete in high school, cross country and track. Not that I was ever any good, but those were the teams that wouldn’t cut you if you had the dedication and/or stupidity to keep coming back and putting yourself through that every day. Later on, in college, I gave up all that nonsense, but I was required, as I imagine most people are, to take a Phys-Ed to graduate. It was here I got to indulge a long held secret fascination: fencing. I actually showed a bit of aptitude and did well. At the end of the spring semester, the professor held a tournament for all the students, both current and past: a first go around with everybody and then two separate tracks for the winners and for the losers of the first round. I ended up winning the “losers” tournament that year. I probably could have done better, if not for a nagging twinge in my lower back…

 

            I didn’t think much of it at the time; a late teen boy’s unshakable belief in his own invincibility. You pulled a muscle or something; take some Tylenol and get over yourself. It’ll be fine. Well, this time it wasn’t fine, and my mother brought me to the doctor, who did nothing more than provide better pain killers. We went back when those stopped working, and some x-rays were ordered. Nothing amiss there, but I was finally referred to an orthopedic surgeon. He also saw nothing on the x-rays but he set me up with physical therapy and a custom-made back brace; maybe there was some soft tissue injury that he couldn’t see and he would give me some more support while the therapy people worked their magic.

 

            By this point, I could not lie flat on my back without incurring excruciating pain. I had developed a pronounced limp and was beginning to hunch over; I was beginning to joke that I would be leaving Baker’s soon to take up bell ringing at Notre Dame. Then, my right arm began to stop working correctly; that was when, as the kids say, shit started to get serious. The orthopedic doctor referred me to a neurologist, who ordered an MRI. Now, let me tell you, this was a process. Nowadays, every hospital has their own MRI machine or at least can get you set up with one nearby. In 1992, these were rare animals and appointments had to be made weeks if not months in advance. Also, these are not the 21^st Century models we have today, where you can have an almost pleasant experience. These were the giant machines with a tiny, man-sized hole in the center, apparently powered by jackhammers. And slow! You weren’t a 20-30 minute In-N-Out Burger like you are today. You got to contemplate your mortality for almost two hours in a coffin-shaped tube with the noise of an NYC road crew for company.

 

            My doctor eventually got my MRI results back and my mom got a phone call. I needed another MRI, this time of my entire spine. Expecting another weeks or months’ long wait, we were surprised that my appointment was tomorrow. Back we went, for another couple of hours of misery; do you remember me telling you how much fun it was lying flat on my back?

 

            The neurologist got the new MRIs and we went to see him. He told us that this was way out of his depth and he was referring us to a very good neurosurgeon; he had already advised him of my situation and I had an appointment with this new doctor very soon.

 

            We then met with one Dr. Bruce Ammerman. In his office, behind his desk, was a gigantic autographed poster of Doug Williams; the year that the quarterback of the Washington Redskins hurt his back, Dr. Ammerman saved the Redskins’ season by getting Doug quickly back on the field and he wanted to make damn sure everybody knew it. He had reviewed my MRIs and I had a tumor growing on my spinal cord, and he was going to have to operate to get it out. He set up surgery for June 9^th and told me I’d need 4 or 5 days of recovery and I’d be fixed.

 

            I woke up June 11^th in the ICU of George Washington University Hospital; my range of motion in my entire body was the ability to bend my right arm up at the elbow and to move my head slightly from side to side. As you might imagine, I was left with the distinct impression that something had not gone to plan.

 

            It turns out that, after fileting my back like a trout, my formerly believed to be benign tumor revealed itself to be a rather dastardly form of cancer called ependymoma. As a cancer that attacks the epidura (the lining of the central nervous system), it apparently was not high on the list of things they were looking for because 1) while it can certainly attack the spinal region, it much more often manifests in the brain and 2) when it does go after the brain, it tends to start throwing sand in the gears of the neurological system much earlier, there being a lot less space in the skull for foreign bodies to grow. Long story short, 99% of the time, they find ependymoma in under-10 year old kids with impaired brain function. Twenty years old, fairly athletic, and with a bad back is not the typical patient.

 

            At this point, I was a mess. My four, maybe five-day stint in the hospital became seven weeks, with outpatient physical therapy for months afterward. That, however, was not the worst part. I had grown a new doctor now, a radiation oncologist. It turns out that the tumor had wrapped itself around things to the point that there were parts of my spinal cord that had been compressed “as thin as a Christmas ribbon” (his words), and that Dr. Ammerman, for all his skill, couldn’t cut out the entire tumor without doing more harm than good. There was a quite a bit still in there, and left to its own devices, it would grow back. Ependymoma is, for reasons only people with lots of medical degrees to their name can explain, resistant to any chemotherapy. Radiation was my only option.

 

            Forty treatments. Five days a week for eight weeks, being bombarded with radiation up and down the length of my spine. Constant nausea and diarrhea (which is amazing since I barely ate), 24 hours a day for over eight solid weeks. If I tell you I’d drag myself across the length and breadth of hell with my lips before I’d ever do that again, I’m underselling it. If I only knew then what I know now...

 

            I had recovered reasonably well; “beaten cancer”, as they say. I had twenty good years to have a career, a wife, a family, rarely if ever thinking about cancer again. Until I started limping. Not a big limp, just a little unsteadiness on my feet sometimes. Well, I thought, with what my central nervous system has been through, I’m not terribly surprised to start having difficulty a little sooner than most. I acquired a collection of walking sticks and went upon my merry way.

 

            Sunday, November 11^th, 2012, I woke up and my legs didn’t work. Not even a little bit. Trip to the emergency room, finally getting admitted to the hospital and a lot of tests later, the consensus was literally *shrug* “I Dunno”. I then was subjected to so many head to foot MRIs I believe I should have an IMDB page with all of them listed as film credits. I was given a crappy loaner wheelchair and was set up with physical therapy to see if I could recover… anything. Physical therapists are great people, because they will never bullshit you like a doctor will. Most doctors, in my experience, will climb a tree to be evasive rather than stand on the ground and give irrevocably bad news; they hate doing it. This is where the wonderful Jill comes in.

 

            I was toting around a bunch of files and CDs from one doctor to another, and had them with me at a physical therapy appointment. I had asked her if she had seen my MRIs and she said she hadn’t; “master’s degrees aren’t qualified to look at them *eyeroll*”. I pulled out the envelope and said “I won’t tell anyone”. She looked at them on her computer and points something out that I hadn’t seen in the doctor’s notes; she wasn’t sure what it was, but looked important. I told her I’d look it up in detail when I got home. Boy, did I ever.

 

            I fired up WebMD on my computer that night and searched for the mystery word: Syringomyelia. Simple explanation: its where your spinal cord sort of “unravels” and develops little voids or “syrinxs”. It can occur when there has been an abnormal trauma to the spine; the major causes tend to be car accidents or damage caused by… spinal ependymoma! The condition is greatly exacerbated if the ependymoma is treated with radiation!

 

The truly amazing thing was that the radiologist who looked at my MRIs figured this out from only my scans, knowing nothing of my history and having never set foot in the same room with me.

 

Armed with this information, I went to my next doctor’s appointment and he agreed with the radiologist and that it was more likely the radiation rather than the cancer itself. “If you had this type of cancer now, radiation would be the very last resort, if it would be a resort at all. In 1992, they didn’t have anything else.”

 

            He still had some different things he wanted to try; none of them panned out (obviously). When I went to my next physical therapy appointment, I told Jill everything and asked point-blank “I’m never going to walk again, am I?” to which she replied simply “No”. She got the ball rolling for a permanent, fancy wheelchair and shifted her sessions from recovery to how to be a better wheelchair pilot. That in the long run, was for the best.

 

            That brings us back to the philosophical discussion from many paragraphs ago: what would I tell my younger self? My knee jerk reaction would be “Don’t have the radiation!”, but I have mixed feelings about that. Would the cancer have come back without it? Would I have developed syringomyelia without it? Would I still be walking without it? The answer to all of those is: who knows? I’m still alive; maybe it would be better now, maybe it’d be worse, but who can’t say that.

 

            So, all that being said, I can unequivocally attest now that, if I could tell my 20-year-old self one thing, it would be:

 

“Date Kim Kasprzak just long enough for her to introduce

you to Cyndi, your future wife, then run away like your hair is on fire!”

 

But that’s a story for another time.

How it all started (Part 3) (Or: “Are you looking for a job?”)

 

            It was sometime in February of 1989. I was in my senior year of high school and had taken, as you might well imagine, photography as my elective class. The first semester was very basic introduction to things and all the few materials we required were provided for us. The second semester went beyond the basics and invited us to expand our horizons a bit, but we were going to have to source our own supplies.

 

            Imagine walking into a business that was quaintly unique in its own time, and would be unbelievable now; such was Baker’s Photo Supply in 1989. A dusty hoarder’s paradise of everything photographic, from the very current to dimly remembered history. I had been in there only once before, years ago; since no one else was interested in dad’s old gear, it pretty much all came my way. 

 

Included in this haul was an old Revere movie camera, which I played around with for a time. I had gone to Baker’s to buy a roll of film for it and was greeted with the incomprehensible question: “Is it Regular 8 or Super 8?” The dumbfounded look on my face caused the ladies at the film counter to take pity on me. “Does your camera look like you have to thread the film in a loop or is it a black box you just sort of pop in?” Regular 8 it was and for the first of what would be a million times, those ladies did not steer me wrong.

 

            Today I was heading in with a couple of barely understood words scrawled on a note from class. I needed to buy a box of photo paper, hoping they would again steer me in the right direction. The ladies called out and a man came from the back of the shop and found me what I needed. I thanked him and told him I was taking a class in high school and quite probably would be back often. Then he said it: “You looking for a job? Talk to her” and pointed to the older of the two ladies at the film counter.

 

            That lady was Ruline B. Baker, the “mom” of the mom & pop that owned the place. I talked to her for a couple of minutes; she vaguely remembered me from the movie film episode (more on that in a bit) and knew I lived in the neighborhood. She’d be willing to try me out working afterschool on weekdays and all day on Saturdays, if I was interested. All I had to do was go downtown and get a D.C. work permit since I was still under 18. I said I would and she said I could start when all my paperwork was in order. So, on March 2^nd (I remember the date exactly because it coincidentally was Mrs. Baker’s birthday), I became Baker’s Photo’s newest employee.

 

            Now, I didn’t know it, but among the photo shops in Washington DC at the time, Baker’s had a bit of a reputation. They had the highest prices in town for new goods. The cost was sometimes well worth it because you could get anything there; especially if it was old and hard to find. Someone would pull out a box off of a shelf, blow untold years of dust off of it, and miraculously pull out the exact widget you were looking for. Also, everyone there was a little bit nuts; you had to be ready for that, but if you didn’t know how to do something photographically, they’d figure out how to get it done.

 

The business was founded in 1947 by Abraham J. Baker and his wife Ruline. He had been a photographer for years prior to setting up the shop and, as the saying goes, had forgotten more about cameras and photography than most people knew. He was very much a curmudgeon and could be brusque with people sometimes, but he always had time to explain something you didn’t know. You could learn an awful lot from him, once he got used to you.

 

            Mrs. Baker, on the other hand, was the heart and soul of that place. Prior to marrying Abe, she had worked for the railroad and had done some sort of accounting work for them. Even at her advanced age, she had an uncanny memory for names and faces and would greet customers she hadn’t seen in years by name as if they were old friends. She also had a carry-over from her old career in the form of a giant green boat anchor of a contraption called a Comptometer. Her hands would fly over this thing like lightning and add a list of figures faster than any young kid with an electronic calculator.

 

            The beginning of my work at Baker’s taught me a few things very quickly: I knew nothing about photography. I knew nothing about how a business was run. I was going to learn, whether I liked it or not.

 

            There were essentially two classes of employees at Baker’s: there were a couple of people that worked for them at their first location, came with them when they moved from up the street (giving way to The Dancing Crab restaurant, a DC icon in its own right), and would be with them till they dropped. The other class was my mine; a high school kid or American University student that would be here for a summer or a semester and move on. Or at least, I thought that was my class… 

 

You see, the Baker’s never had children of their own. The kids that would come and work in the store were the Baker’s kids. I worked there through graduation and the summer after and quit when I began attending college in the fall. I was in the engineering program and made it through the first semester when I came to a realization: it was what I was good at, but not what I loved. In what was the scariest moment of my life up to that point, I went to my mother and told her that I wanted to leave engineering and study photography.

 

 

“Do they give a degree in that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not dropping out of college?”

“No, mom, I’m just changing my major.”

“Ok. Do what makes you happy.”

 

I was not expecting our exchange to go nearly that well. With my immediate future planned, I went back to Baker’s to see if I could beg for my old job back. After unloading my story to Mrs. Baker, her response was very simple: “You never really left.” Once a Baker’s kid, always a Baker’s kid.

 

Thus, my job, that began as my “after school, work through the summer, make some pocket money, temporary” job became more of an eight year apprenticeship. From Mr. Baker, I learned as much about the nuts and bolts of photography than I ever learned in college. (Sorry, mom.) From Mrs. Baker, I learned how to run a business. I learned how to make every client feel good by always remembering their name and a few details about them. I learned how to insult a difficult client without letting them know they’ve been insulted. I learned how to smooth over a client when we screwed up. All of these things were to come in handy in my later career.

 

In 1992, when I got my cancer diagnosis and spent most of that summer in George Washington University hospital, my mother would pass Baker’s on the way to the subway to visit me. Mrs. Baker frequently stopped her, with a funny card or a joke she wanted to tell me, or just to let her know that my whole Baker’s family was thinking about me. One of her “kids” was sick and she was worried too.

 

In 1995, things started to go wrong. Both the Bakers were very elderly by this time, and Mrs. Baker had a severe stroke. It was a terrible thing because we all had such genuine affection for her and to see her razor-sharp mind just disintegrate was heartbreaking. She was pretty much home-bound after that and under round the clock care. Mr. Baker managed to get her loaded into the car just once and park out front so we could see her; she was so diminished, it was painful to see, and she passed not long after.

 

The next year, Mr. Baker fell and badly broke his leg. His only remaining family was a sister and brother-in-law who wanted nothing to do with the shop, so when he could no longer get around, they pressured him to liquidate the business. Just shy of fifty years of being an icon of photography in Washington DC, the place closed with a quiet whimper. I confess to have greatly disappointed Mr. Baker. As I was about to be out of a job imminently, I was contacted by Falls, a competitor in Virginia with a job offer. He had expected all his employees to go down with the ship but I manned my lifeboat about six weeks before the end. A couple of the old-timers attempted to open their own shop, under a new name and in a different location, but the magic was gone and it folded quickly. 

 

Falls wasn’t much longer for this world either, sadly. The two oncoming storms that were digital photography and the rise of the big box stores were doing in most mom & pops. Only the largest chains were able to hold on, and I ended up at Penn. I was there for almost ten years, working my way up from the bottom (again). I watched the chemical darkroom to go mostly the way of the dinosaur, and I saw the megapixel wars finally plateau; there just wasn’t a markedly better camera out every nine months anymore. I finally got the job I wanted along the way though: head honcho of my own store at 1015 18^th St NW. For about two years, anyway; being in charge wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. That was when me and mine made the decision to head for Maine. It was just as well; with the rise of Facebook, no one was printing photos anymore and with the rise of Amazon and the smartphone, hardly anyone was buying cameras at their local shop. The writing had been on the wall, and Penn went bankrupt a couple years after I left.

 

As it says when you look at my social media, these days, I’m a photographer for love instead of money now. I probably would have grown up to remain a very avid amateur and become an unhappy mechanical engineer, if not for one visit to a one-of-a-kind photo shop, on a wintry day when I was 17.

 

            And that is how it all started

How I met “my” Shambleau

 

            The date was August 4^th, 1989; a very big day in a year chock full of them. I had gotten my first real job, I had graduated high school, and had attended “senior week” with my buddies. It is a DC tradition that graduating high schoolers head down to the Eastern Shore for a week of revelries in Ocean City or Rehoboth. It has also irreverently been described as “a bunch of kids looking to get two things, neither of which require an ocean.”

 

            That whirlwind of a week aside, I settled into working hard at the job to stash away some money, until my older brother Dave announced his plans for his summer vacation and that, as a treat for surviving four years under the Jesuits, I was coming with him.

 

            So, on that bright August day, we were flying to Miami to meet up with the TSS Mardi Gras, one of Carnival Cruise Lines finest, to take us on a five-day adventure to the Bahamas. Our itinerary consisted of leaving that night and arriving the next morning in Freeport, spending two days and then heading to Nassau. After another two days there, we would be off on our “fun day at sea”, which basically consisted of the sail back to Miami from Nassau and taking advantage of all the ship had to offer.

 

            I went along with whatever Dave wanted to do as far as outings. We visited an oceanarium and soaked up a lot of local color for the first four days, doing usual touristy things. The last day was where things took a turn.

 

            I was just shy of 18 so I didn’t want to take my chances trying to get a drink; even if we were outside of the US, I was still barely underage. The slot machines were another matter. Dave and I walking with purpose straight to the nickel machines garnered no more than a cursory glance. I was with an obvious adult, minding own my business, and as long as I was spending money… “Ahh, he’s old enough.”

 

            After dinner, we were trying to find something to do and we found it: the cruise director, one Mr. Malcolm Kennedy, was not only a delightful old Scotsman but also a hilarious stand-up comedian. We two brothers were by far the youngest people at the show, but we were roaring with laughter. He finished by saying he was having another show at midnight; Dave and I both knew that the “late night” show always had the best, dirtiest material and immediately agreed to be back at midnight. Or that was the plan…

 

            Knocking around a cruise ship at night when you’re young (and one of you is comparatively very young) can get kind of boring. After a while, Dave announced he wasn’t going to make it till midnight and was going to turn in. I was no quitter, but now I didn’t even have the company of my big brother to pass the time. I fell back upon a plan I had used often in my youth: the video arcade. Plenty of games there suitable for a kid to pass the time. It was a rather small affair, only half a dozen or so machines. I settled upon Dig Dug, a game about digging in a garden and battling pests or something like that… it really didn’t matter. On my third or fourth game in, I heard it, over my left shoulder:

 

“What are you doing playing my machine?”

 

            I turned to look, and I saw them. Now, I need to interject here: the water of the Caribbean Sea has a shade of blue not found anywhere else in the world. Enya wrote a song all about it, and I’m fairly certain she’s not the only one. It’s the reason the world finds that area so beautiful and why so many people holiday there every year and I am here to tell you that all of that pales in comparison to the blue eyes that were staring daggers at me at that moment. I stammered out an oh-so-eloquent “What?” which she followed with a laugh that was like music. “I’m just kidding. I didn’t think anyone was playing Dig Dug but me.” Her distraction ruined whatever efforts I was accomplishing in my game and I was met with a large Game Over on the screen. Little did I know, the game was just beginning.

 

            We made introductions. Her name was Robbie; not short for anything, that was her name. and she was from Hewitt, Texas, a suburb of Waco. Due to the vagaries of school districts, she was going into her senior year in the fall even though she was two months older than me. She had auburn hair and the most infectious smile. It was her idea to walk out on to the deck and look at the ocean. I don’t think I was capable of having an idea at that moment.

 

We talked and talked; about what, I couldn’t tell you. I do know this: it was her that kissed me. I never would have made the first move. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it. My history of being an artist and a sci-fi nerd gave me absolutely no preparation at all in dealing with the fairer sex. Her personality was much more of the “going after what I want” variety, and that’s the only reason this episode was happening.

 

            My knowledge of girls being mostly hypothetical up to this point, I can tell you that first-hand experience was way better. Girls smell good. I’d never been close enough to appreciate that before. Robbie wore Chanel No. 5, which I was later told was too “grown up” a perfume for a teenager, but I couldn’t have cared less. The first time you ever put your arms around a girl and pull her close to you? If there was anything better, you couldn’t have proved it to a then-17-year-old me.

 

            There’s more to the story of that long-ago August night, but suffice it to say, I arrived back at our cabin, somewhat in a pleasant daze, about 5:30 in the morning, never having seen Malcolm Kennedy ever again. I passed her table on the way to ours at breakfast, and spent every moment we could that final day lamenting why we couldn’t have met earlier in the trip. We traded addresses and phone numbers, promising to write and call, which we did. Frequently. An entire paycheck went to paying a phone bill presented to me by my very irate mother. I spent that Thanksgiving with her; her parents didn’t know what to make of this “yankee boy” she’d found. She spent the first half of the following summer in DC, I spent the other half in Texas. Obviously, like a kid who didn’t know any better about the real world, I asked her to marry me and she immediately said yes. We saw each other every chance we had, but we went through all the usual long-distance relationship problems. We fought a lot, mostly about not being together or being together and one of us having to leave. Sometimes it was just the sparks that fly in any relationship too passionate for it’s own good.

 

            We finally, finally, broke up because it was evident, I didn’t want to move to Texas and she didn’t want to move to DC. She ended up marrying a guy named Andy and immediately moving to Napa, California with him. It went bad for them after about a year, and that’s when the phone calls started again. She told me all her problems and how unhappy she was. To this day, Andy blames me for breaking up their marriage, saying it was hard to be married to her when she was still in love with me. She moved back to Texas and has been there ever since.

 

            We saw each other twice after our “final” breakup. A friend of Robbie’s was getting married in Virginia and I had gotten to know her too from when I was in Texas. Since it was close to DC, she invited me too. Robbie and I decided to be platonically civil with each other; that didn’t last long and led to an… interesting and decidedly un-platonic weekend overall.

 

            The last time was about five years later. I had been in a relationship for a few years and it had spectacularly flamed out and I just needed to get out of town for a bit. Robbie and I had been down to a very occasional phone call, remembering a birthday or just checking in. One opportunely timed phone call and I was on my way to Texas for a week. We fell back into silly romance like we were still teenagers… for a week, then we said goodbye. All the old problems were still there and weren’t changing anytime soon. The phone calls died off eventually. I entered into a relationship with someone who would one day become my wife and I was happy and Robbie hated me for that. I’ve tried reaching back out now and again, usually when there’s been some weather disaster or power grid failure in Texas, just to see if she was ok. Turns out… she still hates me, but I’m always glad she’s ok.

 

            So that is the story of the one that got away. I wouldn’t change anything really; I ended up with the right partner even if Robbie didn’t, and everything I went through then played its part in how I got here now.

 

I still have that first look though, and that first kiss, and the smile I get when I smell Chanel No. 5.

How I came to know (and love) C.L. Moore

 

            There are two things that, if you know them, explain a lot about how I came to be the person I am. One is my lifelong obsession with the Universal movie monsters. You may place the blame for this squarely on one Mr. Dick Dyzel. He was the jack of all trades at the local independent tv station in Washington DC. He put on Mr. Spock ears and a futuristic uniform and became Captain 20 every afternoon, playing cartoons for the afterschool crowd. More importantly, on Saturday nights he became Count Gore DeVol, the vampire host of Creature Feature. Though Channel 20 is long since gone from its old indie days, Count Gore has a website (countgore.com) where he streams horror movies weekly to this very day. It is due, in no small part to him, that my love of vampires, werewolves and other denizens of the shadows started at a very early age.

 

            The other thing you should know is that in my late teens and early twenties, I was smitten, practically to the point of decapitation, with the most beautiful girl that I had ever seen. Our relationship was more toxic than you could imagine: we romanced and fought and broke up and made up more times than we could count. Once I was reading an article about Frank Sinatra and the line came up “at this point, he was still strung out over Ava Gardner” and I felt someone could finally relate to the situation I found myself in. If I could have boiled this girl in a spoon and injected her straight into my veins, I would have, no matter how bad I knew she was for me.

 

            One day in the early ‘90s, I was spending a very pleasant evening in a (now late and very much lamented) Borders Books and I came across a volume I knew was coming home with me: The Mammoth Book of Vampires. Easily three inches thick and chock full of short stories by a wealth of different authors, but one story hit me where I lived: Shambleau by C.L. Moore.

 

            (Fairly) long story made short, our hero is the chisel-jawed Northwest Smith, a charming, space-faring rogue. Think Han Solo well before he was a gleam in George Lucas’s eye. He saves a girl from a very dangerous looking crowd who are chasing her, shouting “Shambleau!” He takes her back to his place and tries to take care of her, but she refuses all food. She doesn’t speak his language very well, but she says she’s not hungry, that she’ll eat later. Her head is wrapped in a turban but he sees a wisp of red “hair” once beneath it. She finally unwraps the turban completely and her head is covered, Medusa-like, in red worm-like creatures. They grow and surround our hero, “feeding” on him. His buddy Yarol finally comes to check on him and kills the Shambleau in true Perseus fashion, shooting over his shoulder by aiming in a mirror. Yarol shakes Northwest out of a trance and berates him “Didn’t you know what that was?” Yarol explains what they are and Northwest dejectedly asks “Are they really so rare that I’ll probably never see another one?”

 

            The last stanza is Yarol: “I’ve never asked your word on anything, but I’ve earned this. If you see another one of those things, you’ll pull out your gun and burn it down where it stands. Swear to me!”

             

            Northwest Smith, in a trembling voice, replied “I’ll… try.”

 

            If ever there was a literary character I had so completely identified with, it was Northwest Smith at that moment. I read and re-read that entire book many times, and no doubt I will read it again before I’m done. Every flavor of vampire imaginable dwells between those covers, but none so real as the literary incarnation of my own redheaded vampire. Because if my best friend in the world had made me swear to him that after our last breakup, I would never call her or see her or talk to her ever again… my most honest answer would have been “I’ll… try.”

 

And that is how I came to know and love C.L. Moore.

How it all started (Part 2)

 

            In our last episode, I recounted a bit of my father being the family shutterbug, and now it’s time to elaborate. I didn’t have very much time with my father growing up, for two big reasons. Firstly, my father was the top salesman for a company called Prestolite. Once upon a time, the ignition system in cars used some sort of alchemy called “points” which was replaced by an electronic ignition system, that these guys invented. (“Presto… lite!” featured prominently in their marketing.) Well, back in the days before Al Gore invented the internet, being a top salesman meant traveling. A lot of traveling, on the order of leaving Monday morning and getting home Friday afternoon. He would mostly drive and sometimes fly off to exotic locales like Toledo and Louisville, and always had stories and, without fail around the end of June, he could be counted on to have some questionably legal fireworks in the trunk of his car.

 

            The other reason I didn’t get much time with my dad was because he had a bum ticker like most of the men on his side of the family and that a possible heart attack, of which he at least had one in my young memory, wasn’t any reason to bother a doctor. The reason that fireworks stick out so prominently in my memory was because he had left for his last business trip with promises of another beautiful, slightly dangerous display when he got back. He died alone in a hotel room on July 1^st, in New Jersey of all places, just one day after his 30^th wedding anniversary, the summer before my 10^th birthday.

 

            Shortly before all that happened however, something else occurred.  My father was never one to spend an exorbitant amount of money on his hobby. That being said, if there was a new-fangled camera out there that he could justify to my mom, dad usually ended up with one. His last camera was a very fancy Minolta 110 that he liked because he could carry it everywhere. He also bought (to his and a lot of people’s regret) one of the first Kodak instant cameras, before Polaroid sued the pants off of them. As he was going through and weeding out some of his older collection, a cast-off was about to come into my possession. Not that I was ready to appreciate it…

 

I have owned, used, and seen many cameras in my day that I would unhesitatingly call beautiful; in the beauty pageant of cameras, this utilitarian brick would be lucky to bring home Miss Congeniality. The Brownie Super 27, this hand-me down from my dad, had just become my first camera. Not that the single-digit-year-old was going to be trusted with film, mind you, but it could be something I could play with instead of gathering dust on a shelf.

 

The first thing I was taken with was the small lever on the center front that swung open a large panel, with a shiny circular depression underneath. Being a kid whose kindergarten picture was taken in a Star Trek t-shirt, this was very reminiscent of Captain Kirk flipping open his communicator and thus, very cool to play with. Anyway, if you had tried to explain flashbulbs to me, I would probably neither have understood nor cared very much. I eventually got to playing with all the knobs and buttons and looking through it properly. I figured out the shutter button didn’t do much, until you ratcheted the knob next to it until it stopped, then the shutter rewarded me with a satisfying click. At that point, I could pretend to take pictures quite realistically, which I assume tickled my dad quite a bit.

 

I never took any actual pictures with this camera, but that didn’t matter. It did not hold up well under the tender mercies of a little boy who saw it as more of a toy than a tool, and by the time I got into photography for real, 127 film was well on it’s way to extinction. My first 35mm camera I ever had was a cheap little Ansco compact I got to take on my school exchange program to Germany. My first SLR was a Pentax K1000 I bought (like so many other school kids) to take my first photography class. My first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 300, an ungainly thing that was trying to be the combination of a PDA and a camera, at a glorious 640x480 resolution.

 

But none of those were my first camera. My first camera was an ugly brick I never shot a frame of film with, and only ever used to have Scotty beam me up. It also let me pretend to be just like a grownup and more importantly, just like my dad. Did that set me on the path that led me to being a photographer? Who knows? At this point in time, my long-term goal still was to go to Hollywood when I grew up and be a stunt man in the movies, so I can’t really say that this set me on the path. It probably gave me a little nudge though, and sometimes those little nudges make all the difference.