10-820406-02-23-USA
Life doesn’t always go the way you want it to, or at least the way you think it’s going to. Since the technological revolution things have changed so quickly that one could wake up one morning and be confused about how to approach a particular decision that may have been rather simple the day before. Some things change relatively gradually, like the internet creeping in as a novelty and before you know it, you wonder how you’ve ever lived without it.
Other events can be more universal and sudden, and none ever before like those of September 11 when the whole world was propelled into a new and most unfortunate paradigm in a matter of hours.
There are of course cases where the shift is more personal, such as the onset of an illness or a sudden loss of a job. In 1986, I myself was launched into uncertainty when my flight attendant union, the International Federation of Flight Attendants struck against TWA. I found myself in New York City with an apartment and bills to pay and without a job to pay for them. Faced with what ended up being one of the longest lasting Reagan era strikes, I decided to change my path by going back to school.
With funds at a minimum, the most reasonable possibility was to move back home, with mom, in Annandale, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC, for one year as I regrouped before attending college at the Rochester Institute of Technology. To put it mildly, it was a major turning point in my life, and although I made the necessary adjustments, I felt definitely out of place.
A few years before, the same transition had happened to one of my best friends Tom, when he left Chicago and found himself “back at home” in Livonia, Michigan. Both Tom and I were cosmopolitan city boys who were reluctantly relocated to the family home. I was personally grateful to my mother for taking me back in, but it wasn’t a time without unanticipated difficulties.
This photograph of Tom exemplifies the awkwardness of being out of place, in a place both familiar and strange, welcoming and antipathetic. He seems larger than life in his suburban surroundings, and yet his twisted stance, the hesitation of his movement, his mouth slightly opened, his uncertain direction, all indicate a forced and humbling gracelessness.
Tom did eventually manage to move to New York City, and we were inseparable companions until my move in 1986. We afterwards did stay briefly in touch but he then disappeared, with no trace. None of our mutual friends have ever heard from or of him since.
Livonia, Michigan April 06, 1982
(written November 19, 2006)
