In Brooklyn Heights this morning, I paused before taking my leave to take some shots of the ever-beautiful buildings... Above, the Brooklyn Historical Society headquarters.
Another sumptuous pile of bricks, elegantly piled...
The play of bright morning sunshine with the sharp shadows made me feel as if participating in a movie as it was recorded, projected all around me wherever I looked.
I stopped to take a closer look at a statue in its own little garden: that gentleman is Henry Beecher Stowe (ooops!) Henry Ward Beecher. As I looked closer at the statue, it struck me that he bears a striking resemblance to my late friend Jack Holland, who died in 2004, and who coincidentally lived a handful of blocks from where the statue stands... I see the resemblance especially in this photo of Jack, below...
I left Brooklyn Heights at a brisk walk to the A train at High Street.
All too brief, like my quick shadow along Cadman Plaza, was the friendship I had with Jack. At the time of his death, I felt strong and bitter rage at what kind of fate or force might have caused those who knew him and loved him, the ruinous grief of his dying. Mine was a nihilistic and self-indulgent kind of grief — maybe that's the only kind there is? — and I knew at the same time there was, is, no force behind these events as we live them. Was God's hand behind Jack's death any more or less than it could be said to be behind the continued life of the janitor whom I stopped this morning on Cadman Plaza, and said: "Is this the way to the High Street A train station?"
At the time of Jack's death, several people said to me that time would heal, and that memories of Jack kept him somehow alive and "present" with us. Well, time does indeed heal, as I came to experience once more when my father died in 2007. It heals... like a wound, it stops hurting. And memories, they just... fade. If the dearly departed were to come back a decade after they'd died, we'd probably find it impossible to fit them back into our scarred lives.
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