BETWEEN NIGHT AND DAY, CITY

Different near the lake
nan turpin photographs  

Early morning.   Some of night time left.   A trick of the light.

Look up
nan turpin photograph

Primary Source is taking a reading day today and invites the Primary Source community to do the same.  Here’s a picture from the Ryerson Library inside the Art Institute of Chicago.  When our day has bits and pieces of overlooked time we can always snatch them for even the smallest bits of reading.  Even fifteen minutes on the pages can give us a feeling of being part of something very old.  A little reading every day can give us that geologic peace the dinosaurs might have felt.  And since it is now truly Springtime, we can take our precious minutes to a park bench and when we look up see a ring of trees around us.  Springtime, as the French say, time to turn the page.

NIGHT OF CITY, NIGHT OF TIME

nan turpin photographs
Fossil #1, Fossil #2

 

How we love to see our fossils, the big ones reassembled, jaws agape as if to make a joke or bite a head and the greasy brightly lit ones that illuminate the prairie and make the car cars go.  Hard to find these gas stations now in the city.  It takes the right place in the right night to reveal them, bright beacons.  They’re slipping away, not that sudden “mass extinction” of their elders but a slow, contentious disappearance.  Now they’re rare, soon we’ll forget them and then after that we’ll have them in the new wing of a natural history museum, “Look, Daddy, they sold food and water.  And maps.”

More night walking to come so please do come back.  Wear comfortable shoes.