Canines are cute but are prone to slobbering, jumping and general mayhem.  Unless you stick some kind of a sphere in front of them, preferably one that is a brightly colored.  Now if the sphere is moving, well, then that’s bliss.

I was on one of my usual walks through the bright thoroughfares of Boston when I happened upon this scene:

Check out the look in the dog’s eye.  None else existed except for that large yellow sphere.  I attempted to get a shot of the dog without the yellow sphere but the American Gent was having none of it.  Nothing existed to him except for that yellow sphere.  So I shot away.  Notice that most of the photos are from the back end, as he never so much as turned around or regarded me.  Oh to be so in love I thought to myself.  Oh to be a yellow sphere:

These photos are great.  And they have sat on my hard drive for half a year.  Note to self.  Take fewer photos because some will inevitably get lost in the shuffle:

Soon it will be five years of having this blog and I’ve pretty much made it a policy not to reveal too much or anything about myself up here.  I’ve started blog posts like this before.  Usually right before I tell a really big story about some kind of personal story to me.  Well, on the near-versary of having this blog, I’m about to take a big leap.  I’m going to tell a big story about my life, how it influenced the photos I post.

I’m not American.  I mean I am now, but if fate had gone the way it was supposed to, I would have been something else.  I would have been Polish.  For a while I thought about this almost daily, about how my life would have been different had we stayed in Poland, what kind of person would I be.  I think most certainly I wouldn’t live or die by Mad Men premieres, nor would I be a Red Sox fan.  But I guess that is just surface.  I’m sure they’d be some other ephemera I’d be obsessed with.

As a child, my mother and I would visit Poland, specifically a town called Lodz.  Lodz is a place that has long intrigued me, as it is where in my passport it indicates I am born and it is just an interesting place in and of itself.  It is full of old factories and history and has given the world people like Artur Rubenstein and Daniel Libeskind.  Half of my family still live there.

On our frequent visits there when I was a child, we would visit my great aunt.  My grandfather was an old Siberian, of the kind of stock that rose everyday at 4am and never wore a scarf even on the coldest days.  My grandfather had a big family, which became a smaller family after World War II.  My grandfather’s sister lived in Lodz and when my mother would go and visit, we’d go visit her.  I was about 11 at the time and my great aunt was probably close to 80 at the time.  She always smiled at me and fed me chocolates.  Those are important things at that age.

My mother and my great aunt would go into conversation and I would look around.  My great aunt lived in a neighborhood with all of these industrial brick buildings and I always wondered “who lives there?  What did they used to be?”  Even at 11 I wished I had a camera to photograph all of it.

I frequently trace the subjects and style of my photos to two things — growing up in New York City in the 1980s and those trips to Lodz as a kid.  Brick buildings.  Old industrial brick buildings, full of mystery:

Another Boston fashion statement, I guess:

Well, sometimes I have to take the dust off my lens:

I coated Boston with a little coat of dust with these photos:

I work in a school.  I often wonder what the students would think if we pulled back the curtain on our daily machinations.  I’m not saying that anything major league bad happens in that place, but we all sort of present this positive face whenever we’re out in front of the students, when in fact, a copier may have malfunctioned earlier in the day or it may have taken us a long time to come up with the material we used in our lesson for that day.

Recently, I got to visit the offices of WGBH, the local public television station here in Boston.  I grew up watching WGBH.  It always seemed like a lot of the programs I watched originated in Boston and I often wondered what it would be like to live in that Boston place.

I’ve visited TV studios before, in my previous life.  Commercial television seems to have all the money in the world, but public television gets the short end of the stick money-wise.  But you’d never know from this place.  It looked lovely and well run and all the rest of it.  Check out where they do their classical programming:

And this neat gizmo on the wall:

And some radio recordings being made:

And two shots that are uniquely me: