Daniel

“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.” ~ Walt Whitman

It’s hard to overstate the importance of friends. They keep us honest when we get too full of ourselves. They remind us that there are other fish in the sea. They bear witness to the most important moments of our lives and those moments are tangibly better for their presence. Sometimes they can even convince you that your photographs are pretty decent and that they should be displayed on a photoblog.

My best friend Daniel is such a person. We’ve known each other since college when he became my roommate after a Canadian proclivity for keeping the room icy-cold drove away my friend Farabi. Not wanting to leave me in a lurch, Farabi made sure I had a decent replacement–a rail-thin art major named Daniel. Twenty four years later it’s impossible to chronicle the twists and turns our lives have taken; we both, for instance, have managed to shake off our dateless nights in college to marry up and raise beautiful families. Our lives may have been complicated and confusing over the years but one constant has been this enduring, enriching friendship.

So yesterday when Daniel, an extremely gifted California Impressionist, told me he was going to be painting in my area I jumped at his invitation to tag along. In dying light, Daniel painted and I photographed the rolling Southern Californian mountain range that makes up much of the Cleveland National Forest. With busy lives, we hardly ever get to enjoy each other’s company that much anymore. It was a rich and rewarding afternoon; we’re grayer, we’re creakier and more weather-worn but for a couple hours yesterday it felt like we were young again and the whole world lay before us.