She rarely smiled for photos; plaintive expressions got my portraits into art shows.
Like many kids raised in comparative wealth, H had her own machines to mess with when she got old enough to want to start messing. I had worked a couple of corporate jobs by this point and each one left me with computer debris; I'd also been buying tons of technical crap since I got my first computer sixteen or seventeen years earlier. My basement studio had racks of the stuff, and it was not difficult to outfit H with her own setup. Note the ancient mouse and monitor you might have seen in Mathhew Broderick's War Games, a hit from the previous year.
She's probably absorbed in some early Mac-flavored game. I remember one based on Clifford, the Big Red Dog; there were many others. Her interest in computer games didn't reach a peak until we late-adopted a Sony Playstation and she disappeared into Spyro The Dragon for a couple of years.
Her passion for drawing with a tablet within Photoshop was probably a year or two in future—she had zero interest in the vector environment of Illustrator. After that came Final Cut 7 and videos made with her posse around the neighborhood. She now manages a team of home-based editors (all working in Final Cut Pro) for a YouTube channel.
I'm just grateful that I know a person who can fix my iPhone.
On the rocks
The rocks she's sitting on took on emotional overtones over the years. There were lots of photos. Sometimes while we waited for Carolyn to emerge from the house we'd jump from rock to rock, just playing. There was a colony of lilies of the valley between the rocks and the driveway that was gorgeous in the spring; it thrived in our acidic soil. Eventually most of that patch was wiped out in one of those mini-disasters that afflict any property, if you're watching the space closely enough.
Property is a loaded word. I guess we owned it, or at least we owned it along with a bank. When we left the place a couple decades after buying it we still had a mortgage, and someone else assumed debt to buy it. I never felt like it was mine like my hands were mine, or my face, or some LP in the bookcase. It was an area where I had some control of a few things. The rocks themselves had been in the same position for many thousands of years, moved there by the glaciers that formed the Hudson Highlands; they'd been somewhere else before that. At some point techtonic pressures, perhaps planetary formation itself, had molded them from some previous material. How do you "own" that? My tenure was short, and I was always aware of it.
Attendees at her fifth birthday party
