learning to see

Why do we always think that possessions will change us? Perhaps it is our evolutionary status as tool users -- the thing that distinguishes us from most animals, though not all, as we used to believe. I honestly think I thought when I bought a digital camera I would take it with me everywhere and learn to record all the extraordinary images that bombard me each day. That learning to take good photos was only a matter of knowing how to see, and I already knew that.

Instead, I take it with me only sometimes and the amazing images are strangely shy. They seem to go into hiding when I start to think, how would I shoot this? Usually I am sadly disappointed with how my pictures come out, though the nice thing about digital is you can just erase and forget.

I do rather like this picture, though. The giant women peers down at Port Authority and Eighth Avenue, seeming not to approve of the slice of early 21st-century New York she is looking at. I like all the parallel lines, and the late-day light.

Thursday I went to the floating pool. Though I had watched the progress of work being done on it ever since it arrived at the Brooklyn Heights waterfront, I had not thought of actually going. Public pools in New York I always imagine as being crowded, loud, dilapidated and generally unpleasant places. The floating pool was none of these things: It is spanking new, with a techo-industrial vibe at the entrance. Although there were the expected number of screaming children and frolicking teens, the fact that the pool was open to the air meant the sound traveled up and over the East River instead of bouncing. The two lanes reserved for lap swimming were positively serene. I left only slightly sunburned and in a strangely calm, amiable mood that lasted the whole rest of the day.

Now it is Saturday. Officer Timoshenko, 23, shot not a week ago, has died. In a city full of sad stories, this one struck everyone especially hard. Because he was so young and seemed so promising? The only son of parents who had moved here from Belarus so that he could have a better life in America? That said life bought the men who shot him only a few more days of freedom (which they spent hiding in the Poconos)? I don't know. It's all so sad. Where do you begin?