The Things She Carried

Do you know the story "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien? It is a masterful short story about the things that soldiers carried in Vietnam. It begins with a straightforward list of the equipment (weapons, boots, armor) they carried and what it weighed. Then it moves on to the more personal items they carried (photographs, letters, tomahawks) and the emotions they carried (love, embarrassment, anger) and what the true emotional weight of those things were. By the end of the story you wonder how they bore up under the weight of it all. Some of them didn't. Some of them couldn't.

I'm telling you this by way of explaining this next series of photographs, the things I carried.

I was clearing out emotional baggage today, taking pictures before I threw away things from a trunk I've had for more than twenty years. It's filled with old school essays, old drawings and paintings, old journals and photographs. I used to, every year or two, sort through it and throw things away, but it's been about five or so years since I've done that (and before that, probably another five?) but recently I've been feeling the need to edit.

Here are a few things that didn't make the cut:



Tempura painting I did in 1989(?). I'd like to recreate this in glaze on a platter maybe.



Watercolor (late '80s?).



One from a bunch of sumi-e, sumi ink pictures (late '80s/early '90s?).



A drawing I did in high school of a girl whose look I loved (1987?).

And this, a book explaining about the origin of the name Garcia (my family name), with the devastating quote "DE GARCIA ARRIBA NADIE DIGA." (Nobody speaks above a Garcia.) 



Ha! So true.