There have been two surreal moments that stand apart from my average life.
First, while a senior at North Park College (Chicago, IL) I was a passenger in a car with my brother, Paul Johnson, Lowell Berggren (the driver), and his girlfriend, Sharon Greenwood. We were driving to Minneapolis in a snowstorm after dusk the day before Thanksgiving when we hit some black ice and skidded into the ditch to join other cars. (The tow trucks were certainly profitable that night!) After we got towed from the ditch we decided to stay at a hotel in Black River Falls (WI). There was a line of other travelers getting rooms who also thought it was wise to get off the road.
Then three men who appeared to be the same age as us North Parkers emerged from the hotel’s bar. Two were rather wobbly; the third guy used a wheelchair as he did not have legs below the knee level. Probably due to our age, the three intoxicated people gravitated to us. As the conversation continued, the guy in the wheelchair told us his sad story. One night while walking on the train tracks he fell/passed out – I can’t remember his choice of words – on the tracks and a train ran over him, severing his legs and, excluding his pinky, all other four fingers on one hand. He continued to explain that somebody found one of his legs and that the emergency room crew was able to affix his big toe to the spot where his thumb had been. So this random drunk dude proudly displayed his hand, showing how he can grab stuff with his pinky and big toe!!
I scheduled in November to take this week off, thinking we would leave cold Chicago for Puerto Rico, but that did not happen. So I set a goal to plow into and organize my photographs. I had started this years ago with a series of four, separately featuring: 1) family, 2) Kid A, 3) Kid B, and 4) family on vacation. Since procrastination had prevailed for many years, this week’s effort started with the year 1999.
Now, at least I had chronologically arranged the developed film, created a numbering system, and placed the pre-digital era photos in boxes. For example, July 1999 has two envelopes, which are coded 5-12 and 5-13. In August 2002, my family visited fellow North Parkers a) Jim Michaud and his family in New Hampshire, b) Doug LeClair and his family in Massachusetts, and c) my brother and his wife in New Jersey. We twice took the train to New York City while based in Jersey. The photos from the day of our visit to the “Ground Zero” pit are located in photo envelope 9-11!! I froze for a moment and thought, what just happened here?!!?
