I received a note from a reader who shared a few thoughts after reading my essay about walking making paths (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2024/04/caminante-no-hay-camino-antonio-machado.html). In this essay I shared my thoughts about how the Spanish poet Antonio Machado proposed that through our travel in life, we make our own paths, perhaps where paths did not exist before our walk. The the final image of his poem compared our passage to wake trails boats make through the waves. Machado suggested that those wake trails disappear after our passage, like a vanishing past.
I did not agree with
that perspective, and wrote:
.. In my walks, I might have made a road or two.
And I have looked back, without regret yet sometimes with nostalgia. And when I
sit in my rocking chair and try to understand, I still believe that ships do
not lose their wake trails in the sea, because trails made by cutting waves
find their way back to beaches they know, to the mossy rocks that await them.
Wake trails do not disappear.
As I sat down to respond
to the reader, memories of past trails came to my mind, in a rather unexpected
way. Indeed, I found myself dancing under a mirror ball at Nancy Sinatra’s song
These Boots are Made for Walkin’! It
was the late 1960’s and I was in middle school.
So, I thought I would
answer the reader as a street photographer.
I looked through my “Unused
Moments” file and chose three photos taken with a medium format Twin Lens
Reflex Minolta Autocord, which not only allows for becoming an unnoticed
photographer and does not make people change their behavior, but puts me “at
their level” both regarding perspective and willingness to become one with their
moment.
Bare feet and boots (photo atop the page). I take photos of moments that sometimes do not tell a story by themselves. But when put together, they represent a medley of attitudes and behaviors. There is a kindness in this frame, and a promise. The bare feet are the future “explorers” for a path; the boots of woman have already stopped to give the friendly dog a pat on the head. There is much action in this frozen moment.
Singing in the street. And there is music and dancing in this photo. These Southwestern boots are made for the regional identity of a cowboy/cowgirl and for country songs. It feels like a path from the past that did not disappear with the passage.
Ice cream and memories. This one made
my smile! Well, perhaps there is more than boots and feet that make us stop,
linger a bit, and enjoy an ice cream cone on a hot day. The feet of that walker
had stopped, but the mind was perhaps traveling between the past and the
future. And I was there to find that split second to freeze a tongue reaching
the ice cream scoop!
… Robert Frost took the
“less traveled road” when “two roads diverged in a yellow wood”,
and “that has made all the difference”.
The roads we make by
walking did not exist before our passage. They were not less taken. But they
will be taken by others, some day.
As such roads do not disappear
like wake trails boats make in the water.
PS/ I hope I was able
to answer my reader, even if I used “Kodak Moments” instead of words…
February 22, 2025
© Vahé A. Kazandjian,
2025
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