Sometimes in life you have just enough time to say hello before you have to say goodbye:

No, I mean I’m not crazy and I don’t think it actually takes a long time for the sun to set or rise. I’m pretty sure it always takes the same amount of time, but go with me here.

I guess when we consider our lives, they are a series of sunrises and sunsets. Things arise in our lives and then they set. They disappear. We forget about them and other things replace them. Those sunsets in our lives, they can take longer than we think they are supposed to. Or we hold off on the letting things sunset in our lives because we think if we hold on to them, they will become real again.

Sometimes its time for a sunset, so something new can arise in its place.

(Enough philosophizing, the public says. Give me some photos, woman).

And that I shall:

There’s something about the festivals in the North End that always reminds me of those 1960s Italian movies that take place in small towns with warring families or some other such thing at their center. There is always this dramatic music playing in the background and people are always upset about one thing or another.

My favorite movie for that era is “Divorce Italian Style” where a man does all kinds of things to get a divorce from his wife in Catholic Italy and ends up, well, you gotta see the movie to find out how it ends. It is incredibly funny and full of all of these cliches but has this atmospheric Italian-ness about it.

Yesterday I went to the Santa Lucia festival, where a dollar covered saint is carried through the North End. The people carrying the saint stop at different places in the North End for people to be able to place dollar bills on the saint. Mostly they stop at the homes of the old citizens of the city and they help them place money there. It is a sweet kind of a ritual that reminds you of another time when the young took care of the older people. I also loved the two women bringing the babies over to bless the saint.

To Santa Lucia:

I’m not in the photo with my Bahrain babies, but I really would have loved to be:

What a beautiful place I have discovered. Nothing beats a trip to the mountains in New Hampshire.

Recently, on Facebook I was offered a t-shirt that said “I don’t need therapy. I just need to go to New Hampshire.”

That is exactly how I felt when I visited Mount Washington:

I’ve written before about how songs and images are connected in my mind. I’ve also had a blog entry before about how I listed to a Pantera Song called “Cemetery Gates” when I was flying to London with my parents when I was 17 and how I started out the window the whole time at the moon as the song played. Obviously whenever I see the moon reflected on the water, the song plays in my head.

(instrumental):

And how photography should be based on solid technique while avoiding pictorialist cliches? Yeah, so forget all that.

Here are some photos I took of clouds over the Charles River. Booyah!!!

Update — the salt and pepper bridge remains standing:

Well, here I go breaking my own rules again. I mean I never write about people I actually know or things that actually happen to me. I mean of course the things up here happen to me, but I prefer to be a detached observer than a participant. But I have written about some personal stuff recently and the whole world hasn’t collapsed in on itself, so I guess it is OK.

But anyway, let’s get to the fun stuff. Some months ago, never mind how long ago (oh Melville, thanks for the intro!!!!) I received a message from a dear friend who hails from the Kingdom of Bahrain. He let me know that he would be sending over his brothers and a cousin to spend the summer in Boston. I was happy to receive them and would do my best to provide them with the best possible visit.

Boy, did I not know what I was in for. Three gents from Bahrain arrived, the leader, the sometimes co-leader and the child. Immediately, the started turning my world upside down. They laughed. They made jokes. They made every single outing as fun as I could possibly be. In a summer that included more than a few moments when I wanted to run into a hole and hide, the Bahrain babies, as I later nicknamed them provided fun, laughed, dancing, hilarity and just a hint of crazy to every single outing we spent together.

In a couple of days, the Bahrain babies will depart. And I will cry: