This is Kevin. The family and I met him while out walking during the late-morning hours of the last Monday in April (yeah—time has warped even more since then). A man rode by on his bike (Kevin), who then circled back to ask me (socially distanced, of course) what type of Hasselblad I had slung around my neck. Good eye. T’was my 500c, circa 1960. It’s a heckuva lot lighter than the ELM I started with, even with the 150mm lens I used on that day. Turned out Kevin is a photographer who shoots with Hasselblads, among other cameras.
That Monday was Kevin and his wife’s first full day in St. Paul, having just moved from North Dakota when his wife got a new job. “I can do my work anywhere,” he said, and he was in the process of setting up his studio. Another photographer in the neighborhood? Always a good thing.
“Well, your timing is fantastic,” I said, jokingly. “Welcome to the city, such as it is being under quarantine.”
He laughed. “Yeah, at least the weather is turning.” They found their new house just before everything was locked down, he added.
I thought of Kevin and is wife amid the first nights of serious rioting and looting in the aftermath of the protests against police brutality after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis Police Department officer. A quarantine followed by curfews. A most memorable 2020, and just half the year gone.
And now, to start the second half, while our state has managed things reasonably well with the Coronavirus, nationally, all-time highs are being logged in daily cases (clearing 75,000 one day last week, and routinely more than 60,000) and deaths (more than 141,000—yay!) and our white nationalist, thoroughly incompetent president continues to ignore science and expert advice and instead deliver race-baiting speeches and declare more than half the country the “enemy” during a recent rallying cry to his base.
If polls are to be believed in 2020, there is hope that his willfully ignorant message is wearing thin among people that voted for him reluctantly in 2016. Seeing him bounced from office would be a most-needed positive point in a year heavy with negatives.
And maybe make a moving year, always memorable in its own right, end on a positive for the man on his bike and his spouse. “The lake is really nice,” Kevin said.
“That it is,” I said. “We walk it frequently, or did, before all this.”
“Now we stick mostly to the neighborhoods,” my wife said. “The lake has been so crowded.” My daughter impatiently turned circles on her scooter at the corner.
“Well, we’ll see you around, then,” Kevin said.
“Likely so,” I said. “I’ve been wandering around with my Speed Graphic of late.”
“Ah,” he said. “We can talk gear.”
A welcome conversation that will be, all things considered.
Photo info: Hasselblad 500C, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm f4, Ilford Delta 400
