Surprise!

Jess Coleman showed up today and offered to treat me to lunch. He and I were teaching colleagues for years, and he's still teaching art--now at Prairie View A&M, in Texas. He came with great news: he has been commissioned to make an oil painting of Ms Opal Lee, the "Grandmother of Juneteenth." His portrait of her will hang in the Texas Capitol. She's a civil rights activist, 95 years old, who campaigned successfully to make Juneteenth a federal holiday and a reason to talk to our children about slavery, racism, and freedom. He met and photographed her and is working on her portrait now, but he came to the west coast for his daughter's wedding in Sacramento, California, and then decided to drive north to enjoy the weather in Oregon and Washington before heading back to sweltering Texas.

As we were walking to lunch, a stranger (Extra 1) noticed our cameras and stopped to talk to us about photography--and allowed us both to make portraits of him. He told us he worked as a professional photographer's assistant for some years, and he was hoping we could help him find work.  

Extra 2 is the scavenger hunt I created for Bella and Evan, a ploy to get them off screens and out of my apartment into the beauty of this perfect summer day. They succeeded in finding discarded masks, a construction crane, graffiti, squirrels and crows, a delivery truck, bottle caps, and other urban wonders, and tomorrow they're going to compile a list for each other and for me and we'll do it all again.