Ville de Paris department store in the Homer Laughlin building on South Broadway, downtown Los Angeles.  Built by the founder of the Ohio china company in 1897, the structure was expanded through to Hill Street in 1905 and in 1917 the Grand Central Market opened on the ground floor, the city's oldest and largest open air market.  At one point Frank Lloyd Wright had offices in the building.  Photo dated 1904 [LAPL Photo Database].

The present moment seems as unsullied as fresh snow, a crisp blank page, not even any footprints.  A clean new year, and it's just me that comes with the baggage.  Then I get this feeling there's more going on.

A week ago I stood about where those ladies with the small child in the photograph are standing.  It was night and Bianca and I were out on the prowl with our cameras.  We were parked around the corner.  Just us on the deserted sidewalk outside, right before Christmas.  Grand Central Market illuminated and empty.  Except nothing's ever really empty, is it.

Yesterday I'm rummaging around the Internet when I find this image.  It was also my birthday and the end of the year, and so as you might imagine I am a little more sensitive than some of you to the passage of time and sentiments like, "Out with the Old and In with the New."   Everybody wants to celebrate.  Trust me.  You bring a piece of cheesecake with a lit candle on it to someone's table on New Year's Eve, everybody in the restaurant wants to sing along.  It's like they're looking for a distraction.  Something else to say hello and goodbye to.  I'm not trying to fabricate a coincidence or connection, even if you think I am.  I'm really not trying to force meaning where none exists.  But I'm not making this up either.

I don't know if you've ever been aware of crossing your own path.  Or maybe you have and not realized it til afterward.  Believe me, I did not say the other night, "I have been here."  I did not feel that sudden breath of memory on my neck that gave me deja vu and goosebumps.  I did not see the ghosts of men in horseless carriages at the curb.  I did not think about walking on graves or strange dreams.  And besides, I had been here before and in broad daylight too, recently -- maybe a week or month before.  But now, stumbling upon this library archive photo.  I mean the Now that contained the me who was a boy from Ohio who'd eaten off Homer Laughlin china, who'd peered in those windows the other night, who keeps finding his way back to 1904, who wanted to grow up and be an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright... You see what I'm getting at?  Okay, maybe not.  

I don't know what deeper pattern you may find in your own journey, or even if you're looking for one.  I can't tell you what rhythm of image and word, number or rhyme, leitmotif or lyric, reason or significance your life may come to possess along the way.  But I am telling you, on this bright and brave new day of the new year, I feel as if I might not be discovering or experiencing anything for the first time.  I feel like I am only being reminded of words I have written before, thoughts I had in some other place or year or world or time.  I've just forgotten is all.  I am seeing everything I used to know all over again, everything I once saw and heard and wanted and looked for and loved.  And just like it must have seemed to me then, a long time ago, this time it still feels brand new.