Ben moved to San Francisco thirty years ago and really, we were never that close to begin with.   But he found me on Facebook and I recognized his name immediately when the Friend Request popped up.

I’ll always think of him as a banjo player, but these days he’s a photo journalist.  He posts pictures on Facebook and I wish I saw the world through his eyes.   I would never have noticed the chrome-yellow box emblazoned with the red scorpion, much less photographed it,  framed by the…

It looked like a sunset on a stormy night, an ominous deep purple streaked with angry red.  Cheerful garnet toenails added a surreal touch of Hollywood glamour to toes dark as thunderheads.  My first impulse was to scrub them clean but soap and nailbrush can’t touch blackened blood dried under swollen skin.      

Three weeks later, the sunset has faded.   I should have photographed it right after I broke it, when it still looked like a special effect, like a prop in a zombie movie. …