Randy

A day before I left to make photographs in Thailand I found out that my cousin Randy had died. It has been several days now since I heard the news but I keep thinking back to the times as a boy that Randy and I spent together. We used to go motorbiking in the fields and trails around his parents acreage. Randy had built a raft with his father that he kept at a small isolated lake nearby, we used to ride our motorbikes out to the lake, get on the raft and head out to open water. Poling the raft around the lake was like something out of Mark Twain, a Huck Finn moment. I remember laying on the deck of the raft as the sun beat down on us, hot summer days floating and looking up a the clouds. The lake had many perch in it and we used to use fishing line with small yellow jigs to catch dozens of small pearch which we then released back into the lake.

Over the last several days I have been thinking back to those teenage days with Randy. We are about the same age and it seems so wrong that he is gone now, much to early only 45 years old. I have to use the time I have left wisely, have to make the photographs I want to make before I run out of time as happens to all of us one day.