It is quiet in here. I listen to myself think, and sometimes I do not like what I hear. But it is quiet enough that I can, at least, hear. The room is quiet, yes. There is no music, no noise but the sound of a truck idling outside — a car horn bleats and the truck moves on, the silence returns save for the sounds of the thrashing cheap plastic keys which pepper the appearance of these words. The silence of the room is not the silence I mean. Silence in my head, silence in my consciousness, silence of respect and concentration, silence of both feet flat on the ground.
I made a startling but exciting-to-me-and-me-only discovery last night. I found a CD containing over 3,000 pictures I took in 1998 and 1999, pictures I took with the first digital camera I owned and which for years I thought were lost. No masterpieces, of course, but this extra wash of images from over a decade ago feeds nicely into my current pre-occupation of capturing “then and now” photos, in which I find photos I took ~10 years ago and match them to the exact spot today to see what has changed. The newfound images from 1998 and 1999 had plagued my mind for years. I knew they had existed, but where did they go and when might they rise again? While clearing some shelves I found a CD labeled “SYQUEST” and immediately thought this must be them. The images were stored on a tape drive years ago but had I copied them anywhere else? The disk itself seemed like it might fail, and in fact the process of copying the images off the CD took 3 hours — an inordinately long time for ~650MB of data. It was exciting to see these images appear, slowly, one by precious one.
Speaking of old pictures, I recently scanned a bag full of about 300 pictures from a family that lived in Beverly Hills, California. A scanner I bought at B&H made the task of scanning these hundreds of pictures way easier and faster than with other scanners I have owned, but true to my melancholy nature I greeted this time-saving gadget with ambivalence. Should I be glad to get more scanning done more quickly, or should I be depressed at the time wasted up until now?
At any rate, I spotted an interesting image among this series. Taken in the 1950s, this shot appears to show that the skating rink at Rockefeller Center was once filled with water. It seems reasonable enough to use a skating rink as a pool during the non-skating season, but I do not think I have ever seen or heard of the Rockefeller Center rink as a reflecting pool.
I may be staring into this image with wishful thinking of having discovered something vaguely mysterious, but it looks to me like the water flows over the short wall beneath the statue of Prometheus and onto the surface of the skating rink. Here in the 21st century the rink is used as an outdoor dining space during the summer.
Whether it shows a pool or not is of no importance, though it reminds me of ephemeral memories of places gone from Rockefeller Center. I used to get my hair cut at a place near the skating rink. Today that space is a Starbucks. Among those 3,000+ pictures I found this week are some pictures of the phone booths at Rockefeller Center. All the Rockefeller Center booths are gone but I have a picture of one row of booths which puzzles me because I simply can not imagine where they it have been. I used the phone booths at Rockefeller Center a lot in the early 1990s, but today every last one of them is gone. I also have very foggy memories of a diner that used be in that building, a diner which I think had a train theme to it. It might have been called the Night Train Diner or something like that, and the décor of the place featured railroad train cars and wheels. Or, like the pool of water in the skating rink, I could be completely concocting this place,which, whether or not it ever existed, huddles safely and silently in my memory.
The solution to these mysteries might lie in a Rockefeller Center visitors guide from the 1980s, which would most likely list phone booth locations and — if it existed — a diner. I’m on it.
