Questions about pictures

Remembering Timm tides over to an era of surprise encounters - not much coming from the site's faithful administrator (yours truly), but comments and queries arriving from folks who have chanced upon the site. Last week we heard from Shayla Walz, and yesterday I received this email from Margaret Oscilia:

Hello David --

I happened upon your blog today about Timm. We met Timm at Trinity Covenant one night while we were there working with the homeless families --- we were evening hosts and Timm was the overnight host. My husband and I found so many things in common with Timm -- and loved him immediately. He was so interested in everything we did - how he could help make our business better, who he knew that might need our work -- he always made us feel so valued. He was one who cared and took action.

We loved to philosophize about solutions to the homeless, addicted and social issues, and even more loved to talk about flipping houses, fixing things and the joy of working on jobs you love. Timm was working with us on a large job - a model home and magazine article when he passed away. We've attended Trinity for 10 years, but suddenly the church was not as friendly without Timm's big grin from the other side of the room -- how I miss him horribly.

He was special to us, and always will be.

I'm not the eloquent writer that you are, but he is missed, and his legacy lives on - his enthusiasm and passion and determination to make a difference still lives on through many of us. Blessings to you and your family as you grieve this loss.

We'd like to buy some of his nature photography and have it framed to use in our home and also in the model homes we stage for sale. Please let us know how we can do so.

Thanks to Margaret for the caring response. It's wonderful to hear how engaged Timm was with his community, always showing interest in his fellows, offering tips, advice, condolences, commiseration. "He was one who cared and took action" - what a man Timm had become.

* * *

Margaret's question about obtaining photos is one that needs to be addressed. Beyond viewing Timm's images in the online gallery of this blog and his photo website (linked at the top right of this page), folks are welcome to order images. Cost would depend on whether someone wants an emailed image or have something printed up and mailed - significantly more, obviously, for the latter. I've made a couple of 5x7 prints by sending the digital image to a local processor and the quality was fine and the cost nominal (two or three dollars for a 5x7 print, if I remember correctly).

My mother has asked for a large enlargement of a particular photo, and I haven't cost it out yet nor determined how well these images will enlarge. Some will do better than others, since the original format varies in size.

When I get back to town I'll try to work out something and communicate it here. For now, I'm handling things on case-by-case basis. (Heavens, doesn't that sound official?)


* * *

Oddly, at the same time I received an email from Jim Hunt, city administrator of the City of Mt. Angel, Oregon, asking for use of one of Timm's pictures (of a tulip field) on the city's website. To me, that's a freebie, though I'll ask Jim for a small donation to be made for the upkeep of Timm's Exposure Gallery website (it costs about ten bucks a month.)

Sunset in St. Paul from my window.

It will be 85 degrees today here in St. Paul. Sheesh! And I hear that they had record lows in Orlando last night (63 degrees). Not what I expected ...

For some reason, I keep thinking I'm in Salem -- Timm's town. St. Paul, like Salem, is the state capital; there are loads of state buildings about. The Missisippi River winds an adjacent course to St. Paul as the Willamette River does in Salem.

So there are physical correlatives. But I think it's the strange emptiness of this city that makes me think of Timm's town -- perhaps because it's all business, or mostly business in this city, everything empties out after dark. Walking after dinner last night it was eerie, so much human construction utterly absent. A ghost town after dark: maybe that's what makes me think of Salem. Not that Salem is an empty place, hardly: I loved its vivacity, all of those coffee shops and book stores and tulip-rich neighborhoods. It was just absent of Timm, the only reason we had traveled there.

I'm not quite catching the mood. But I have had a couple of hard crying jags for Timm since getting up here, surprising since I haven't done so in at least a month. Listening to "Prayer Cycle" on his laptop iTunes as I lay on the bed in this room between business sessions, missing my wife and cats and garden, curtains pulsed back to reveal St. Paul fading into dusk, city lights taking over, hard darkness, the sea everywhere and nowhere, some far bell tolling Timm's name.

Well: another day of work here and then it's a day of flying to Pennsylvania, Minneapolis to Detroit to Allentown, with weather questionable and the airline industry wholly annoying (I now have to pay for a window seat, which I won't, and the airlines care nothing about canceling flight if they can't book 'em full.) Ah well.

It's so bright and warm outside I have the curtains half-closed, the fan on and I write in my boxer shorts. Ah the northland, yah sure yew betcha. Dunno why it's Timm's town but he's surely near here.

Sunrise in St. Paul from my window.