A Thousand Little Stories

This is my thousandth blip.

The picture shows the newly restored mural, "We The Youth" by Kieth Haring, at 22nd & Ellsworth Streets in South Philadelphia. When it was first created in 1987, I had lived in the city just a few years, and this neighborhood was as impoverished and crime-ridden as can be. This whole town has changed so much that it seems like a strange dream to think of the way it was thirty years ago, when large swathes of the landscape looked like the war-torn foreign cities we would see on the evening news.

I tell stories from memory all the time, and I love taking photographs --especially since Ceridwen gave me a digital camera in 2007. Blipfoto was another gift from that splendidest of blippers, and this website has given me a venue and a daily wish to record my thoughts with a visual accompaniment. It has become a substantial and entirely positive activity within this quiet life I lead.

I have blipped about:
my family's history
An adventure I had in Paris
Ida C. Craddock, the martyred soul
and of course, my dead anarchists.

Have I mentioned that I love my cats? They are Max (who is half-moose), Carlo (my "bagpipe cat"), and Laura Earle ( a feline supermodel).

I ordered a grape-vine cat yesterday --a gift to myself. I feel good about being whole, and feeling well these days. Blipping had coincided with a recovery from illness.

Kieth Haring's mural fits the occasion because most of the individual children each have a unique inner picture, just as every person is a walking collection of tales that has no second copy. Blipping is a perfect way to capture that angle of our little human lives.

Thank you, blip friends, for throwing just a pinch of your lives into mine. It adds something good to the flavor. I've never tasted it before.

Thank you, Blipfoto staffers, for creating this grand and beautiful gossip fence. The world is a better place because it's here.