sycamore limbs
with their brown thinning leaves
and seed balls for
little birds

Today, I picked up quite a find at a thrift shop benefitting a local hospice. Eisenstaedt: Witness to our time. First published in 1966, this book contains over 300 photos taken between 1930 and 1965 by the remarkable and prolific LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Many of his photos are of famous people, but not necessarily at their polished best. One of his most popular images is of a sailor exuberantly hugging a nurse bystander during a parade at the end of WWII. However, in most of the pics, serious expressions outweigh pleasantry and humor, and subjects tend to look as though they struggle with their roles in life. There are occasional very attractive portraits, people with great poise, but most are of flesh responding to the weight of realities of war and living. Even the whimsical cover photo of an ice skating waiter bearing a tray of wineglasses shows a man who experiences his work with weary intensity. Many subjects look like real characters, self-doubt mingled with bravado. He had an eye for capturing beneath the skin.

The book becomes a sort of pictorial history. Eisenstaedt covered the opera stages, streets, dinner tables, government halls, ski slopes, bars, canals, and deserts around the world. There are dogs, elephants, frogs, camels, spoonbills, roosters and cheetahs. Most animals, though, are pictured as they relate to people.

As an amateur photographer, I’m fascinated that perhaps a quarter of the images here aren’t clearly focused. Now that we’re living in an age of affordable digital cameras with amazing auto-focus capacities, it’s easy to forget that there was once effort involved in getting lighting and focus coordinated for each image on film. Critics today can harp if every part of a photo is not crisp. It’s refreshing to be reminded a picture can have great impact without perfect technique.

In a way, this book is contrarily cheerful. It gives the viewer permission to belong, to be a somewhat flabby, baggy, self-inflated, out-of-focus, dour, imperfect human along with hundreds of people Eisenstaedt photographed. In his fine work, even governmental rulers, great scientists, and movie stars are mortal members of the general mass of humanity.

The moon dangled,
a bright leaf
against dark blue dusk.
Moms strolled their babies.

a rare night,
the air shimmers with vibrations
of those who touch
ancestral threads
our lives rich
with blended harmonies
of friends, relations
this boy, that woman
who lived long past
or is still to come
whose hands are out of reach
but whose song resounds
within our hearing

I tried to feel one enemy's shoes
bruised and creased
on my feet -
they don't fit
they hurt in odd places
but it's hard to feel hate
standing in those shoes

flowers nod from stranger's cart
milk and cookies below
such tenderness

A salute to the lives of:
Phoebe Prince
William Lucas
Tyler Clementi
Asher Brown
Seth Walsh

A book recommendation:
All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Robert Fulghum

Cocoa the housecat wakes up at 4:10 am, wanders outside for an hour or two, then curls back asleep for another hour. Around 1 PM, Cocoa's catching zzz's again for another couple of hours. Shall we offer the cat pills for insomnia?

Are we certain humans are supposed to sleep eight hours straight? Perhaps we force ourselves into a modern-era time schedule when our bodies and their natural biorhythms are designed for something less rigid: a smaller block of night sleep, and a nap or two during the day. Research has already suggested the human body yearns for siesta early in the afternoon.

Perhaps our mammal bodies are also programmed for different amounts of sleep according to the season: more sleep in the hibernation-friendly dark of winter, less in the long hours of light in the summer.

All my life, I’ve awakened occasionally in the early morning hours. I learned I had the choice to worry about it, or enjoy the quiet hours, listen to the radio, walk outside and look at the constellations. Hard to do with high pressure job obligations the next day, but where possible, it's ok to listen to the body's requests and timing.