Valentine's Day
My daughter is a therapist intern at the CA mental hospital where Carleton
Watkins, the great 19th century photographer of the American west died insane.
The San Francisco Earthquake (1906) burnt his studio down including all the
glass plates from which he made and reproduced his work.
There she treats a geriatric poet with Parkinson's Disease. In his wheelchair,
twisted over in pain, he says the drugs are his 'Gordian knot'. Today he told
her that her real name is "Grace."
"Why?" she asks.
"Grace means you are elegant, you have power, and you have light."
What a lovely gift, I tell her. Before his loss, he must have been a little or a
bunch of all those things. Beyond that I am wordless. Absolutely wordless.
Stephen Vincent
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