(For my son-in-law, Aaron Hartzell, 11.09.1974 – 03.10.2024, on the anniversary of his birth)

It wasn’t always easy taking a walk with you.
Rather, it could be an eye-roll-inducing experience —
the way you (camera ever-at-the-ready)
tarried to examine every eye-catching blade of grass,
every play of light in a leaf-littered rain puddle,
not to mention the attention you lavished
on the salt-bleached flotsam and jetsam at Ocean Beach.

But oh my, the images you captured
(sometimes at the expense of our patience):
Dew drop pearls, like a spider-web necklace
strung between strands of beach grass,
a universe of stars radiant in a mud puddle,
sandcastles accumulating on a battered beach stump,
even halos around our mugging, hurry-it-up faces.

An eye for life through a camera lens was your brilliance,
an eye for beauty in the odd and the seemingly ordinary —
that was your gift to us, the legacy of your too few years.
Thank you, dear man. Thank you for helping us see.