Traveling to New York

For those of you that don’t know, you can take over the world with a face like this. If you haven’t already met Susan from my earlier post, meet her now. She is my good friend who was up for a random trip to New York. I had some photography work here, so we decided to get out of Texas for a few days before. What you may not know is that Susan is sitting on the steps to a very important history mark in my own life. She supported me as I went to pay homage to West 14th and 7th Avenue, where my grandfather lived and my mom grew up. I never met him, he passed away when I was in college. So the closest I’ve ever been able to get are these doors. That is until Susan nudged me along to approach a lady entering the building. Erica, her name was. I had a mini panic attack and then spoke up; “Excuse me, this might sound weird but is there any way I can get higher up in the building? My grandfather used to live h…” and before I could finish, she cut me off to ask who as she was a native of the building for three decades. In a moment of truth, I said “Fermin Lopez”. She looked at me real odd-like as if she was rolling through the files of her mind to get back to that time. Finally, she smiled. Come to find out she lived across the way from him and walked us right up to the door. A wave of emotion hit me as we climbed those steps so sadly, I wasn’t thinking to get a photo of her and my do I regret it. I will pay her a visit the next time I go though. Erica was so kind. And Susan, so supportive. She even snapped a photo of me in front of my grandpop’s building and if you’ll notice, the photo on my about section is of me shooting into a mirror at my grandmother’s house. A lucky one I am. To have these sentiments. The older I get, the harder I cling to those memories and my own imagination of what he was like. He used to write letters, half spanish half english and they are all I have. I’m just holding close the things I have because man, I have been in some challenging places in life, and am recently learning that I am not always on the receiving end of challenge. One of the best people I’ve ever known said that you have to be a tough SOB to get old. That comes with pain both inside and out, screwing up a little too much, and understanding even more. Thank you Larry Vaughn.

On the way up to my grandpa’s old apartment.

So then we took a trip to the West Village. I found a very helpful lady on Instagram [westvillagelife] who posts about all things around the West Village, which led me to this little french tapas place called Buvette. Suddenly Susan realized that were were only a block or two off of the place where the show Friends was filmed, so I snapped a memory over there too. About this time, I think Susan started getting tired of being the subject of all my photos, and little did she know that her cute/funny faces kept me agging her on even longer. Such a photogenic lady. Then we decided to go check out the Brooklyn Bridge.