FACES
Last week, what started as a project to organize photographs to post, print, and make available ended up as a slow meandering adventure down Memory Lane. I was reminded of why I bought my camera in the first place: these faces.
It’s not often I take pictures of people in a professional setting. For fun, sure! When you have zero expectation, absolutely! But I would never trust myself with a wedding, graduation, or other sacred event that only happens once, where do-overs aren’t possible. But I do love catching faces in soft light, faces full of laughter, faces with downturned eyes, faces who aren’t looking at the camera, faces who are just in the moment, enraptured with life as it is presenting itself right there and then. Raw, honest, unposed. Candid.
In my travels down Memory Lane last week, I came across a folder of faces. My favorite faces. We had escaped in the middle of the pandemic to Race Point Beach on the tip of Cape Cod. It’s a beach where you can catch both the sunrise and the sunset. Someday … at some point, I will see both in the same day. But on this evening, we stole up Route 6 to catch the sun sink to its knees off the coast. We argued all the way about how long it would take to get there. I try to minimize the ride to 15 minutes, and they shout it’s really more 25-30 minutes. They’re right; they can’t be lied to or tricked anymore. But I doggedly still sticking by my timetable. Just wait til the day I tell them I want to see the Race Point Lighthouse, accessible only on foot - probably a 2 mile walk down the beach from the parking area. “15 minutes!”
We parked the car and ventured down the trail to the edge. The beach was nearly empty of people. We were welcomed by waves, a salty breeze, and a sky that surely inspired Langston Hughes’s phrase, “a blue-cloud cloth.” The sun was beginning to slip into retirement for the day. The blues, the grays, pinks, a hint of purple; no filter was needed. My pals started throwing a football around, diving into the sand as if ESPN’s film crew was on hand. And then the silliness. Shouts of line from Remember the Titans and Sandlot peppered the air, especially since Tom had chosen that day to wear his L-7 Weenie shirt. And then the laughter, full on, unadulted, and uncensored. Tom’s comes raspy from the back of his throat; Jake’s is a hearty chuckle that’s always accompanied by a head shake. They are blurry, they are unbridled, they unhindered. I sat on the blanket, washed in the music they created. The love and friendship between brothers was palpable, though they would never admit to it out loud.
That’s ok. They don’t have to. Their faces say it for them.
