It was September 1978 when Eisenhower High School English Teacher Gil Hernandez assigned my English II class to write in a journal three times a week.
Less that a year later I almost lost the damn thing.
Dad let me take his car to school. It was the Cadillac our family bought years earlier for our vacation to California, but as it got older, it became Dad’s everyday car. (It’s hard to fathom today that a car that guzzled fuel at a rate of 8 miles per gallon could be an “everyday” car.) Michael and I decided to hang out after school, so we got in this 5000-pound rolling house of a car and rumbled off down 53rd Street in the direction of my home.
As we drove on, something didn’t seem right, and when I looked in the back seat, I didn’t see my journal. It dawned on my that I’d put it on the roof of the Cadillac while I unlocked the door, and left it there.
In something of a panic, we turned the boat car around and raced back toward the high school. We spotted the journal sitting forlornly in the middle of the road in the very busy intersection of 53rd and Gore. In my mind I began to formulate some kind of a plan to pull the car up to it when the light turned green and grab it through the open door as we passed it. But before my plan was concrete in my head or the light was close to turning green, Michael was out the door. He dashed like an idiot into traffic and grabbed the journal like a football, then dashed back to the car and got in.
Nearly losing the journal wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as many of the things I wrote in it.
I gotta go back in time and get this guy laid.
What if the secret meaning to your life was on the destroyed page?
Or, there is an interesting musing, to create what was on the destroyed parts.
Love the ressurected spiral wire and soft bokeh frame.