A Certain Slant of Light September 5, 2004

Sunday afternoon, Labor Day Weekend, 101 degrees. I’m sitting in the blue chair in the corner of the master bedroom. The late afternoon sunlight comes through the window on the other side of the room. It shines through the thin, oval leaves of the Fichus standing in a small plastic pot. The leaves cast pale shadows across the grain of the oak floor.

There is a certain slant of light. We searched the Internet in the library of Sonoma State looking for the poem by Emily Dickenson. It was October. The grant had just expired, and I was visiting Morgan in Santa Rosa. He was trying to find a theme for a project in his photography class. As we drove around town or sat in restaurants, I suggested topics. I described them to him enthusiastically even though I knew that he would never use any of them.

The existential despair that sunlight evokes in autumn, have you ever felt that?

No.

I wonder how much of myself, I project into him.

You feel hollow and get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Capturing that light, that’s the project. Evoking that emptiness using nothing but common images, a wall, an empty chair, an old man photographed from behind, all evoking meaninglessness and futility just because of the way the sunlight falls across a surfaces.

That was when I told him he needed to quit his part-time job as an assembler at R&D Industries so he could focus on his education. Surprisingly, he agreed and said he would tell his boss the next day. After work the next day, I went to meet him to make sure he told his boss he needed to quit. I was waiting out in the car. He came out and asked me if I wanted to meet Tom, his boss, and Tom’s wife. That was surprising too. Walking across the parking lot, I asked him if he told them he was going to quit and he said he had.

And they said what?

That they understood. That getting an education came first, that I was a good worker, that they would miss me, but that I was doing the right thing.

Driving south through Santa Rosa on 101, I asked him what he had said to Tom.
He said that he told him that he had been talking to his dad a lot lately and …..

That was all I heard. I liked hearing him say he’d been talking a lot to his dad lately. Morgan didn’t talk a lot to anyone, especially me.