Off to a good start this week with my day 6 entry. This one is already spoken for. After it is bound up it will head to Brooklyn to an old friend. He makes documentaries now. Here’s a photo of him working http://www.avenueeproductions.com/rob1.htm
path, mixed media, 5×7 inches
The wonders of the internet! Recently I got an email to my amanobooks account that said: “is this Bridgette who went to Northwestern U. and lived in Chapin Hall? This is Rob…” I never would have expected to get an email from him ever! I haven’t seen him since 1997. We lived in the same dorm freshman year of college and although we weren’t close friends, I would say we had a special connection. Kindred spirits, I guess. He was one of those quiet brooding types and I could always count on finding him up in the wee hours of the night for a chat on the stoop of our dorm
The beginning of my sophomore year I was still living in that dorm, and while things seemed normal to the outside, my life was falling apart. I mean, major shit was going down and I was being forced to make some huge life changes. I had to withdraw from school and didn’t have any money and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Anyway, Rob didn’t know what was going on, but he saw that something was happening and one late night when I sat on the stoop smoking a cigarette he dropped a folded up paper in my lap and just said, “this is for you” and walked away. This is what he wrote me and I still have it:
To B.G.
There’s something troubling in the turning of your eyes
A certain seam of sadness in your smile
Eyes shaded with the passing of a longer mission
And from deeper within
I have seen you in a silence
And have wondered at the withdrawing glow
It seems you have been set aside for a life apart
A wisdom in your burden you’ve staved alone
So I thought I would write a simple poem in your name
In praise of a virtue enduring not always seen
Perhaps unworthy of a meal-time phrase
To say “Keep on, the path you walk is a good one”
Oct 13, 1995
In his email he was interested in one of my journals. He had always been an avid writer. I told him that I would make one especially for him because I owed him. His poem he wrote to me meant so much to me back then. Like an invisible hand holding me up and telling me that everything was going to be ok.
So I put those last words of his poem on this mixed media piece for my friend. I will probably never see him again, but now he will have something of me. Here’s a link to one of the documentaries he just did http://www.avenueeproductions.com/indexA.htm
What an amazing story! There are definitely angels among us. When I read the words it reminded me of some words of encouragement someone wrote me during some dark times. It goes “I don’t feel no ways tired, I’ve come a long ways from where I started from. Nobody told me the road would be easy. But I don’t believe He’s brought me this far to leave me.”
much love,
jo