On any given Sunday morning (16 months gone today)

For the 16th-month anniversary of Timm's passing, this photo essay by Timm on a family battling all of the usual internal and external pressures-time, interest, appetite, diversion, stress, and squabbles, the collective disorder of family life which is both joyful noise and derangement.

The series, as I decipher it, is that of an archetypal family trying to get to church on time, make it through the service without a meltdown, and then whatever unity attempted for the hour of a service frayed and splintered back to normal come fellowship hour.

There are other players, too, several smaller families, an older woman, a young man in a beard (who looks, to me, a lot like Timm, or his observing persona). All apart of church life at its vibrant worst, an itinerary of distractions from worship, a morality tale with a giggle tucked into its lesson.

One of the pictures from the series - from the fellowship hour - has already appeared here, but it was out of place with the rest - already digitized and tucked in a folder on Timm's llaptop. The rest of the images were found in the most recent slide scans from Wade. Perhaps that image was the kicker, as if only one image was called for the project.

I'm figuring that Timm shot the series for some church project which he had volunteered for, illustrating how disordered lives can disorder a church. Discipline is the absent factor in all of these, yet what's really missing is reverence -mission distracted by the world, or wordliness. Everyone in the images gets drawn into the central family's disorder, becomes a part of that distraction. No one's paying much attention to the service, or can, while the family drama is playing out.

Here we go ...








































I see several Timms here. There is the Timm whose own church upbringing was in the context of a big, squabbling family; Timm is the boy in the series who is the most distracted, face in the cereal, still trying to play a video game while the family boards the station wagon, drawing on Dad's neck while Dad attends to the baby, sitting under the reception table munching away on a pastry.






There is also Timm the Dad himself, the ghost of his failed marriage, perhaps recalling the work of bundling wife and two teenaged stepkids with all of their emotional difficulties-some quite normal, others perhaps teetering on the pathological--into the car to get to church. Timm's memories of that time were surely conflicted, assuming a role he had been so critical of, finding out, perhaps, that the sins of fatherhood are all too easy, having to always act the adult when one's inner child was yet unruly and rebellious. (I sure had a lot more gratitude and forgiveness for my parents once I put on daddy pants during my first marriage, charged with the care of a step-daughter about to jump off the high-dive into puberty.)


And there is the Timm the observer - perhaps that bearded guy in back - aghast at how much distracting energy fills a family, how difficult it makes any orderly procedure (like a church service), how baffling and insane children are. The bearded guy is single and sits at the back of the congregation, grateful, I surmise, to be a good distance from the ground zero of family life.. This fella may be the adult lost child, whose lens was cracked on all matters of family, keeping him distant from his birth family and unable to enter one of his own choosing. Perhaps church attendance was family life enough for him, as it is for many; of perhaps church was a survival from family life, and he wished to see his church be cleansed of family raucousness, its attention re-focused back to the service.


Timm's participation in church was deep and abiding, yet as The Photographer he would be able to keep at some remove, to continue to be the outside observer, to be both its advocate and critic, its satirist and aggriever.

But these are just reflections and guesses here. If anyone who knew Timm in Oregon reads this, perhaps some day they can clarify these images for us.

Whatever these images were created for-whatever homily was entrusted to them-they are, in pure, raw, and unexplicated form, a pure hoot to look at.

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Sixteen months gone today: another annivserary, dimmed in significance, the number unremarkable except that it's been that long. To mark his death today seems far more arbitrary, yet I still need to mark the time, if only to allay by one post Timm's fade deeper into oblivion. I know, that's what the dead do in our living world, but it's our job to slow the process and cherish the memory of our dear departed.

I'm still recovering this sweltering, dank, dark Tuesday morning from the yard sale we staged Friday and Saturday of this past weekend. It was a lousy but necessary choice of a date-who's out yard-sale-hopping in the teeth of Florida's hot, stormy summer? It was a royal sweat-fest lugging everything out, boxes of books and glassware and knickknacks, furntiture too, from an unused buffet in the dining room to an enormous hutch which Beth had thought would work in the space where the piano used to be but soured on it as the weeks and months passed. A mad dash to get tables set up and fixtures hauled out of the garage, all that stuff set up by 8:30-ish for what turned out to be a much smaller crowed spending less money-fewer dealers because more shops have closed, fewer passerby who can part with dollars, what with the cost of food and unemployment running over eleven percent in Lake County. Kind of a bust for a yard sale but we made enough over two days to make a utility bill payment and get a couple weeks's worth of food - it helps. But you're working cheap, pulling these things off.

We left a huge hutch out by the road with a "free" sign on it, just too tired to try to move it back in the house. (It's gone, this morning.) Moving that big thing out to the front yard from the back porch reminds me of the massive, Southwestern-style armoire (raw rough looking wood) Beth got for the upstairs bedroom which took four deliveries from Service Merchandise to get right (the first three were damaged), and then never quite fit in with the airy mood of the room, too massive, the style not matching where Beth was evolving (white, Shabby-chic-style dressers and such).

Beth said she remembered Timm and I lugging that armoire downstairs and out to the garage during one of Timm's visits here, in 2003, when he was back from his Bolivia trip. It's a miracle that Timm didn't crack a vertebrae or twist some other essential ligament in the attempt-that's what usually happened to Timm on a moving project or bicycling excursion or dive into a pool.

I barely remember the event, the two of us grunting that huge thing down the narrow steps between floors, grunting and wheezing and stumbling down all the way and out to the garage. The two of us standing outside the garage afterward, wheezing, sweating, me thanking Timm for the help, he saying No problem ... Beth says that Timm was, hands-down, the best house--guest we've ever had, so considerate, easy, as interested in hearing about our lives as telling us about his, helpful to a fault, as when he gamely volunteered to help move that monster armoire downstairs and out to the garage.

I think of the two of us huffing afterward, a couple of aging guys with bad backs and sore knees and/or shoulders, no longer young men but trying to prove we still had it, paying dearly for our game and lame attempt, limping back into the house and onto the back porch where we sat and watched it rain and talked of things I do not remember any more.

Timm sitting across from me at the round metal table on the back porch, somewhat in shadow as the rain clattered on our tin roof and blurred the view of the back yard, pouring all of that ocean's receipt over house and garage and oak trees and lawn, heart-waters, uteral-waters, tears, sweat, the waters we sailed getting from there to here.

Timm's chair across from me empty now, the rains long soaked into the ground with the promises of more in the next day's forecast - we are in our rainy season here - and a line of tropical waves and depressions and storms and hurricanes now bunny-hopping our way from Africa toward Florida, each promising more rain, latent with winds which could haul us all of to Oz, waving the oak trees back and forth in a song which is ghostly of Timm's singing in his church far, far away.

I still see you, brother-your smile from behind the camera, your blue eyes twinkling, your voice in baritone harmony to my own, darker now and fainter though forever here ...