Soooooo......today I went liberal artsy with pictures. These are real photos that I took, but I altered them to match images from my childhood memories. There is the realism and then there is that which clings to the dark edges of our minds. Yes....some of them are scary, but I remember this bird in a book written from the 1950's at my Grandparents' house. It was a collection of encyclopedias on a dusty shelf. I was in love with dinosaurs but remember reaching a page with this bird on it. It gave me nightmares from the eye color alone. And it scared me so much that this particular encyclopedia would call my attention many times on visits that followed.
Then there were the peacock feathers in my parent's old house in Two Rivers. My mother loved the feathers. As kids, we loved tickling each others faces with the tips of them.
But they also scared me. Why? This picture captures the "eyes" that are watching me. I enhanced the blue just to make my point.
The design reminds me of the 1970's. Talk about a decade of ugly fashion!!! Bell bottom corduroys with butterfly collars. Barf!
Here is the photo unaltered. The male really makes quite a statement in the wild with these feathers.
And here is the peacock again from behind. The tail feathers vibrate so quickly that it doesn't look real.
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| Victoria Crowned Pigeon |
But this last photo is the one that haunts me. Those encyclopedias were thrown out before I could get to them after my Grandparents died. The book that had the weird New Guinea bird with the red eyes along with the scary dinosaurs might be gone, but that forgotten memory has be restored and recaptured once again. And I still stare at it with admiration, fear, sadness and nostalgia.
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