I took about 100 photographs today.  Here’s the setting:  Margaret’s Red Hat group planned a train trip to San Juan Capistrano that turned into a car trip when the train the group could get to take them back to San Diego got them to the city too late; so I was enlisted as a driver… not a reluctant one because I knew I would get to wander around with my camera. I left the women in a cluster near the train station even though they hadn’t done a train trip.  I agreed to join them later at the Mission after they had lunch.  I got lunch at a Starbucks across the street from the ruins of the Mission that was built in 1776.  Starbucks was a good choice because I got a free giant frappuccino topped with a sinful mound of whipped cream because my birthday was last week.  The banister told me I had two days to get the free drink or the birthday gift would expire, so I changed my order from a small dark roast coffee to the tall frappuccino and a sandwich: …lunch.

While I ate lunch I browsed the pages of one of my notebooks that I found in the trunk of my car. What I had written was at least a year old and I found a question I had asked myself: “Is innocence overrated?  How is being innocent different from being naive? On the same page of the notebook I had made notes about Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  I had reminded myself that Salinger had made the his character’s name from William Holden and Joan Cauldfield.  I also had written in the notebook, “Does Holden want his sister Phoebe to be innocent but not naive?”

Today was one of those days when I wished for an English classroom full of seventeen-year-olds.  I settled for these six photographs out of the hundred pictures I took in San Juan Capistrano today and forgot all about what Salinger had put on Holden Cauldfield’s mind in those pages of Catcher in the Rye.