October 10, 2010
Sunday

Today was one of those periodic alignments of numbers — 10-10-10, the tenth day in the tenth month of the tenth year in the twenty-first century — and no matter how you express the date, MM-DD-YY, the way Americans do, or the European fashion of DD-MM-YY, you get a string of tens.

I am often fascinated by such alignments, especially when they are random. On August 1, 2006, I noted that “I wrote a note to myself this morning, putting ‘8/1’ at the top. Then I got into my car and noticed that the outside temperature gauge reported that it was 81°, the time was 8:11, and the odometer reading was 818181. I drove to a nearby office to transact some routine business, and when I got into my car again I noticed that the temperature had climbed to 83°, the odometer now read 818183, and it was 8:33.”

The next year I looked at the weather station in the kitchen and saw that it was 7:25 on 7-25 and it was 72.5° both inside and outside. And I still have a note that my sister left as a phone message for our father on “4-5-67.” (I’ve saved it not because of the string of numbers but because she used the handiest piece of paper available, the back of a letter my mother had received some forty years before about her course work at a music school. Why that letter was the handiest piece of paper available remains a mystery.)

Sunrise 10-10-10

This morning I went out for the paper, and as I turned to walk up the driveway, I was struck the way the sunlight filtered through the tree I call our Sentinel Tree, and I got my camera to take a picture.

The camera is new, a Canon Power Shot SX130 IS. Last week I visited a cemetery just outside Lancaster that was near the Hands-On House, a children’s museum where I took Lynn many times in the early 1990s. As I turned at the old house that the museum occupied then, I remembered my Canon Sure Shot, a 35mm point-and-shoot film camera that I got in 1984 on our first-anniversary vacation trip to a horse show in Massachusetts. It served me through Lynn’s infancy (and the approximately one million rolls of film any new mother shoots in that first year) and beyond, on my trip to the Island of Iona in 1990. Either I left it at the Hands-On House that summer, or it got stolen out of my car (which I was not then in the habit of locking regularly), because it vanished around then, along with the photographic record of that visit.

I never liked any subsequent camera I had as much as I liked that one, including the Canon EOS 35mm SLR film camera I got just before my first trip to Wyoming. That was really two cameras in one, a traditional SLR where you had to make all the setting decisions yourself, and an automatic feature that made most of the decisions for you. Just before my second trip west I gave it up to a young friend who was ready and willing to learn to use all its capabilities, and got a simple ultracompact Nikon Coolpix.

It was that camera, plus the one included in my phone, that I had with me in the cemetery. I had arrived very late on a cloudless, sunny day. The sun shone full on the rows of polished stones, and although it was pleasant to walk there, it was awkward to try to photograph the place I had come to see, because it was too bright to check the composition of the shot on the LCD  screen of either camera. The phone camera is good only for taking a quick picture of the flowers I’d brought to commemorate my visit to a friend. I had some more success with the Nikon, and wondered if maybe another visit under different atmospheric conditions might be better.

In truth, though, I was feeling constrained by the very simplicity of the Nikon. If the Canon SLR film model was too much camera for me, the Nikon was too little. Anticipating my first trip to Vermont in the fall, I did some research. The Canon Power Shot costs half as much as a Canon 35mm digital model like the film camera I had because it is only half the camera — the half I actually used. A call the next day at church for used digital cameras to take on a mission trip gave me the reason (or, maybe, excuse) to acquire a new camera.

Sunset 10-10-10

Though I remain primarily a literary artist, I want more visual expression in my work — more color, more image. Last week, Catching Days, Cynthia Newberry Martin’s blog, featured a piece on a day in the life of Hannah Tinti, a writer I both know and admire. The piece included a few pictures. After I took the picture of the Sentinel Tree at Sunrise, I decided to go about today, and take ten pictures for 10-10-10. This gave some focus to what can often be a haphazardly-spent Sunday.

I’ve included only the first and last here. The whole set can be seen at my Flicker site. Choose “slideshow” to see them in the proper order.

And look for more color and more image and more days in the life from Vermont. Thank you for reading, so much, so often.

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