Theme Thursday - Friend

I don't usually take pictures of people, so I don't have very many pictures of my friends. There are some exceptions, though.

Below is the only shot of my friend Jackie that I have in digital form. I have more, but they're from the days when I was using film and sending them out to be developed into actual hard-copy photos, and at the moment my scanner is dead. This one was scanned as well, but it seems to be the only one I scanned at the time. Well, there are others, but they're not very good and Jackie's threatened me with a slow, painful death if I ever publish them. I went to high school with Jackie down in Maryland, and we hooked back up in 2002 through our graduating class's Yahoo Groups mailing list. She lives in Colorado now, but she came east that year for the Newport Folk Festival to see Dylan's return to the festival after years of his boycotting it. This shot was taken after the festival was over and we went to Horseneck Beach in nearby Westport, MA, one of the best beaches in the area. Yeah, I was giving her the tourist tour!

In 2007 I met Elizabeth Evans, known to just about everybody as "Bob" because her Dad wanted a son after a string of daughters; when his wife presented him with another daughter he rebelled. Bob was a fellow photo essay enthusiast posting on Gather.com, and since she lives only about 45 minutes away in Massachussetts, we started doing photo trips together. But the first time we met in person was for the 2007 Norman Bird Sanctuary Harvest Fair on September 29 of that year. Bob and her husband Bill, fondly known as "Papa", had made a trip down to the NBS earlier that year after seeing a two-part photo essay I'd done on the place that July. So when I phoned them and told them the Harvest Fair was coming up, they were all set to go. The following picture is of Papa (in the chair) and Bob (sitting on the ground) watching Jim McGrath and the Reprobates playing at the music stage.

The next shot is from the same Harvest Fair. This is my little buddy Waylon; he was 2 in that shot. Waylon's parents, Nikki and Vic, are friends on mine, so Waylon's been a buddy since he was born. In this instance he's hanging on to Bill, who he'd just met, because I was just on the other side of Bob with a big bag of Kettle Corn, and Waylon loves him some Kettle Corn! Nikki was sitting behind me regretting her son's appetite. Heh, heh! And yeah, even though the shot was taken deep in the Red Sox Nation, that's a Phillies cap on Waylon's head - Nikki and Vic are from Philadelphia.

The next shot is of my friend Virginia, who has gone on quite a few photo safaris with me, including hiking in the snow at Weetamoo Woods, where this shot was taken. V and I both worked at the local Home Depot and were both unemployed after having been relieved of our duties there. V decided a cheesecake shot on this bridge over the creek in the park was a good idea. Despite all her snow-bunny regalia she still got chilly lying still in the snow on that cold, cold stone!

And just so y'all don't get confused as to who this is posting this, I'll get back to my usual subject matter with a shot I took of two buddies sharing a branch - two Mourning Doves in Ballard Park in April of 2008.

Music time! Okay, so given the generation I was born in, the first "friend" song that popped into my head had to be Carole King's "You've Got a Friend". Seriously, when the Tapestries album came out, I'd learned all the songs on it in a week. And "You've Got a Friend" is just one of those timeless classics. This video is taken from a 2006 PBS tribute to James Taylor, who turned Ms. King's already hit song into something that launched into the heavens and lit the night skies. And wouldn't you know it, ol' JT came up on stage and sang with her. Obviously a grand time was had by all that night!

The other song about friends that popped into my head simultaneously with the Carole King song was Bette Midler's "Friends". I looked on YouTube but couldn't find a concert clip I liked, so I picked this slideshow backed by the song because it describes the song so well. Enjoy!

Photos & text © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger