As some readers know, I moved to New York to start a business as a photographer. Thanks to the lockdown and the public stigmatization of all things conservative, I gave up. I’m hoping that proves to be temporary, but in the meantime, I’m making photos of things that interest me.
It’s funny, but before I moved here, I fantasized about making action portraits of athletes like LeBron James or Steve Nash. I would have been very happy to be flown out to Hollywood to do a portrait or three of almost any celebrity in town. If Pfizer’s Albert Bourla had called for an annual report portrait, or even an ad featuring an industrial production facility, I would have been happy to do it.
Now, all of those jobs sound either not very interesting or even repellent. My current focus is the churches of Dutchess County. These, it seems to me, make more sense than any amount of tarted up Hollywood glamour. No matter how flattering the makeup, hair, styling, and lighting (never mind the retouching), we’re still looking at portraits of people who sold out America. Not many things are less attractive than that.
Churches are a place to meet one’s neighbors and to help each other live righteous lives. More people should get to know each other that way. Who needs the Internet when we all have churches in our towns, no matter how small? The first time I ever went to church, I got a big surprise:
By 1976, I’d lived in a couple dozen rundown apartments with my mother and sister. My mom was a feminist who used her woman power to date every man in sight, including a few dangerous ones, to quit every job she wasn’t fired from, and to refuse every marriage proposal from the few decent men she met. By then, my life had been in danger many times, as had my sister’s. It was a scary time made worse by atheism.
Ever since my mother was forced to give up her first born child in 1963, she hated the church. I grew up without any knowledge of churches or religious things, as close to a pure blank slate as one can be while still harboring deep antipathy for all things religious, which I thought to be synonomous with stupidity.
Because we moved so often, and my mother’s paranoia about past boyfriends finding our new address, we never contacted friends again after we moved. This meant I had no social network to feed me information about the outside world. Instead, everything I knew about the world came from my school, which focused on things other than contemporary life, or my mother, who was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed the CIA had agents stationed in our attic.
And then, something amazing happened: after moving out of the Los Gatos area, and away from the school I attended there, Lakeside Elementary, we moved back to a town that was close enough that we re-enrolled at Lakeside. There, after a year’s absence, I renewed my friendship with a tall skinny kid named Dayton. Dayton was a Christian, but I liked him anyway.
Dayton’s mom, Sara, felt sorry for me, so she gave me Dayton’s hand-me-downs. It was kind of funny, but I was wearing the clothes he had worn the previous year before we’d moved to El Segundo. They fit me because, as kids go, I was pretty small for my age. When I saw myself in a mirror, I looked like a smaller, skinnier, Dayton.
Dayton’s father, George, was building his own house by hand in the mountains. All he had so far was a pit in the shape of a foundation, a garage that they used to store their things, and a trailer that slept in and used as a kitchen. For bathrooms, they were on twelve acres, so they didn’t really need bathrooms. They didn’t have electricity, so they got by with oil lamps or, if they really needed it, a gas generator.
One weekend, I was at Dayton’s for a sleepover. I had come up on Friday, and Dayton’s mom was going to drive me home on Sunday afternoon. On Sunday morning, Sara made sure I had all the sausages I could eat, and anything else she might have had besides. For some reason, my friend’s parents always seemed to think they had to fatten me up.
“It’s July 4th, and our church is having a picnic. You boys get dressed quick so we don’t arrive late.”
I’d never been to church before, unless you counted when my mom would park in the back, go in, and then come out with a box of canned soup, fruit coctail, and maybe a loaf of bread. I liked Dayton, but did not want to go to his church, no matter how much fun Sara said it was going to be.
“The Bible is science fiction, okay? I can’t go there and pretend anything else. It might as well be a comic book.”
Sara smiled. “We’ll see about that. Now you two get dressed.”
I don’t remember the sermon. What I do remember was the joy of being in a building surrounded by at least 100 people who sincerely wanted to do good with their lives, and to help others. That kind of unselfishness, though expressed simply as friendly smiles and warm handshakes, was something I’d never seen before. I spent the day eating watermelon, playing with the other kids, who treated me as cordially as if we’d known each other our whole lives, and running around on the grass.
It was the best day of my life until then, and remained the best day for at least another decade or more. It didn’t change my stance on religion, but that day stayed with me. I never forgot the feeling of being safe and looked after, even if it was only for a few hours. For those hours, I didn’t worry about moving suddenly in the night, having a gun in my face again, or telling my nine year old sister I didn’t want to share her food because she’d begged our neighbors for it and I thought it was demeaning.
We moved shortly after and I lost track of Dayton. Twenty-six years later, I had a dream of his mother, Sara, telling me that someone had died in Dayton’s family. Over the next month, she appeared in two more dreams, with similar messages. Worried that Dayton had died, I tried looking him up on the Internet, but couldn’t find him. A year later, I was looking at the record of those dreams in my journal again, and realized it had to have been Sara who died. After all, she was the one talking to me.
I looked her up, and almost immediately found her obituary for the year before, right in the middle of the dreams I’d had. Her funeral service was held at that same little church I’d enjoyed so much in 1976. I called them up to leave my condolences, and the lady there offered to put me in touch with Dayton. Within days, we were on the phone, after almost three decades.
A little later, he came down to visit me in Los Angeles. The following day, I had to work, so Dayton took my wife and daughter out to Disneyland with his wife and daughters and they had a great time. Best of all, I got to tell Dayton how much that day at his church meant to me.
Here are a few of my recent photos of Dutchess County churches:
You can see more on my website.
I want to start shooting farms also. I’ve only done three so far, but I’m hoping to meet a few farmers who will give me permission to tramp around their property for a few hours.
BTW: I surrendered my atheism in around 2004. Glad I did.
Crying for that dear, sweet little boy. You are a miracle. I know about that safe, loving feeling. I've experienced it intensely a couple of times in my life. I do believe it is a foretaste of heaven.
Praise God! (I'd write more, but I'm crying happy tears😇)