Walking through my childhood neighborhood always triggers mixed feelings...I'm flooded by memories, but the wear and tear of the years can't be disguised by memories turned rosy, filtered by time...
Where you just see a boarded up, run down house, I see myself telling jokes with my first best friend Ricky in the courtyard (before the faux Spanish re-do) and reading
"The Little House"
for the very first time in his mom's beauty shop (the center section)...
She gave me the book; I still have it. I treasure it and the memory.
But as much as I'd like to, I can't ignore the boarded windows. The emptiness. The neglect. And it makes me sad.
That's the story of Deepwater, and why I chose to post these photos in black and white; as I walked, I saw the neighborhood through two sets of eyes, past and present...
For me, the next two photos do a good job of depicting Deepwater as it is right now, a neighborhood straddling the past and the present..
...the first, an empty lot where the childhood home of my friend Brad once stood...
...and the second, a brand new picket fence bordering a sidewalk that has felt the weight of children's feet for almost 60 years...
Such a contrast, and the first one breaks my heart. But I feel that together they depict, more than anything, that this is a neighborhood in transition...faded in spots...perhaps even dead in spots, but overall still clinging to life, refusing to give in to time.
While some houses, like Brad's and Ricky's, are boarded up or torn down, others have been given facelifts and corrective surgery, taking decades off of their appearance; children still ride their bikes, play basketball, walk to school...creating their own Deepwater memories.
For that, I am grateful.
