Sixteen (plus twelve) candles.

It is not at all surprising to me that I've seen my first blooming daffodils of the year in a fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment. New York City has always been a city of flowers for me: flowers on our dresses the first time I came to the city and rode the carousel in the Park, before I even knew about the other Park, flowers in front of every street corner shop at every season of the year.

I'm appropriating these flowers because twenty-eight years ago today my parents dropped me at a neighbor's house and went off to Buffalo's Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital and had my brother. (That's Millard Fillmore, not my brother, at the right.) I'm the one who got lucky that day. No one has ever had such a terrifically thoughtful and hilarious brother as I. And I know darned well that most people aren't gifted with siblings they actually want to be near, much less be near for long periods of time. In honor of him and his singular but multi-cameraed way of visioning the world, I'm hoping to blow out an entire memory card this afternoon as I traipse from place to place. And maybe even to make a pilgrimage to the B&H Superstore--or at least the International Center of Photography.

Happy birthday, guy.

*****

Henri Cartier-Bresson's work is genius. If you live within reach of the ICP, go see his Sketchbook.

As I photograph with my little Leica, I have the feeling that there is something so right about it: with the one eye that is closed one looks within. With the other eye that is open one looks without: one sees the shapes, the living quality of what moves one to photograph. Without passion, without working with the emotion of the heart and the enjoyment of the eye, nothing vital can be put down.

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1946