PHLAC

The fortieth sector began at the end of August 2003. The buoy—that’s what my grammar school mates like to call it—is our midlife marker. We’re out in the ocean backstroking lightly to shore for hopefully another chunk of forty years or more.

There has been a lot of time to reflect, connect and create. I like the sound of those words, that type of rhythm, that kind of idea. After ten weeks of post-treatment group therapy, I was ready to attempt something new.

I pitched the tour manager of the rock group Yes with an idea which was inspired by the Gulf War coverage on CNN and in The New York Times. I would travel on the band’s tour bus for a two-month stint in Europe, a thirty-city tour, as their embedded photojournalist. Not only would I shoot, I would record audio interviews, and upload the data back to their official website so enthusiasts would have an intimate behind-the-scenes recount of the tour. It came very close to happening, but the band chose instead to utilize the idea with a video production company for a commercial DVD release (Yesspeak).

The summer of 2003 was heating up, especially in Europe. I had dollars to miles adding up quickly on one account which essentially meant a free flight to anywhere. The New School in Manhattan listed photo workshops in Tuscany given by world-renowned photographers in association with the Toscana Photographic Workshops (TPW). I booked three weeks in Italy.

A short stay in Rome was highlighted by a Yes concert (complete with tour bus transportation) at Foro Italico. Next I stayed two weeks in the Tuscan town of San Quirico D’Orcia where the workshops happened amid scorching hot days, and communal dinners with free-flowing wine every evening in temperate clear nights under the stars. I met many fine people from both Europe and America, most notably Martino Pietropoli from Rovigo, Philippe Pache from Lausanne, as well as Simba Gill from San Francisco–all who have remained friends. Since New York is a central hub for photography, people I’ve met at the these workshops are always passing through.

I delayed my routine CT scans till after my 40th birthday. Every member of the club knows the agony that accompanies the anticipation of scan results. Feeling out of control, it’s easy to focus too much on those few words that will come out of your doctor’s mouth pronouncing the status of your health. Everything hangs on a thread in that moment; when you hear that the scans are good, it’s like signing a new six-month lease into the land of remission. Maybe it sounds a bit dramatic but there’s incredible relief with each successive and successful scan.

My wake-up call didn’t happen with cancer. That unraveling began when I was 26. Turning 40 while riding the relief of remission refocuses things a bit. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of it. There are solemn, somber and low days. People all around are getting sick and dying. I’m right in the grip of early middle-age searching for moments of respite from the wreckage. And through it prevail simple gratifications-–a conversation, a dinner, a night out listening to jazz, a photograph that makes me say “wow,” or a classic song that takes me back to when I first heard it. These are pitted against some of the poisons which infiltrate—greed, indifference, ignorance, duplicity, violence, bigotry. If you’re in the thick of things, you’re a constant witness to all of it.

It was the day before New Years Eve 2003. I stood in the middle of Times Square on a chilly windy winter day reveling in the bustle while waiting to meet my young cousins for our annual holiday jaunt around town. Throngs of people rambled by, digital cameras pointed upwards all around where the ball would drop one night later to turn the clock into a new year.