...in a friend's back yard... more than beautiful flowers.

J.D. Salinger’s Seymore Glass is one of my favorite fictional characters in all of world literature. I first met Seymore in the short story “For Esme--with Love and Squalor. I wanted to know more about him, so I read “Seymore, an Introduction,”  but it was in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” that I learned about Seymore’s “funny business with the trees.”  I hadn’t thought about my own quite focused interest in trees as “funny business” until today when I reread “A Perfect Day Bananafish.”  Some of my friends, and perhaps some of my family whom I count as friends have wondered why I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of tree bark. It’s reasonable to wonder why someone would stop in the middle of a walk in the woods or down a peaceful street to take close-up pictures of a tree with unusual bark (I was going to say whose bark caught my attention, but decided to avoid such a personal pronoun because that would probably seem really strange). I don’t have an explanation... and I don’t know exactly what Seymore was doing with the trees, but we do know that he did enough damage to his wife’s parents‘ car that it cost around $400 to fix, and that was in the late forties or the fifties.  All we know about it is this little bit of conversation  between his wife Muriel and her Mother.  

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"Mother," the girl interrupted, "I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact."

"Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?"

"I said he drove very nicely, Mother. Now, please. I asked him to stay close to the white line, and all, and he knew what I meant, and he did. He was even trying not to look at the trees-you could tell. Did Daddy get the car fixed, incidentally?"

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O.K., O.K...  I pay attention to trees. It’s easy to stereotype trees. When someone says or writes “pine tree,” my mental encyclopedic archive of trees comes up with an iconic image of that general kind of tree. The image that comes to my mind is like the pine trees that grew where I lived as a child. I carry around in my head an image for every kind of tree I have ever known, and I assume that's true for every person.  But bark or tree skin, that’s another matter.  Like fingerprints for people, bark is unique to every individual tree.  I find the abstract patterns of the bark to be... at least, interesting... often fascinating... worth a picture.

Today in the backyard of a friend, I was drawn a weathered cross-section from the trunk of a very large tree.  The only camera I had with me was the cell phone, so I took these pictures.  How could I not be interested... in what's inside trees as much as the skin outside.