Black and white, right and wrong, etc.

cardinal fish pic borrowed from Seegrest Farms' Facebook page

I don't think it is just because I chose a career mostly dominated by law enforcement that I see things in a very ON or OFF fashion, I have always been that way.  When you come to a fork in the road, you either have to turn left or right, going straight won't work, unless you have a tank or something like that.

In applying fisheries or safety regulations, the person is either in compliance or not.  I realize that there is grey area.  Sometimes the humans who are interpreting the laws do not see things the same way as the ones who wrote them in the first place.  My job for four years in Alaska was to interpret the intentions of the regulators, fishermen and scientists, and explain to them how the laws they wrote would actually have to be practically enforced by a 20 year old kid with a gun who spent the whole night before on bridge watch and had potentially lost their lunch in the drink on the way over to the fishing boat.

[Losing your lunch (and I have unfortunately done that) is much easier than losing a coded radio or a clip of ammo:  MUCH LESS PAPERWORK!!!!!]

We have recently been going thru some of our artwork that has been in the same storage boxes since before we left Massachusetts in 2006.  Kind of like getting new birthday presents that look somewhat familiar to old birthday presents.  I get excited, like a kid in a candy shop, waiting for them to be unwrapped and anticipating what they might be........

Is it the print of the watercolor of the Boston Aquarium montage of African cichlids???
Is it the Winslow Homer print that I got during college of one of my favorite works from the Art Institute of Chicago?
Is it the amazing small photo of Ana Purna that Andy's friend Scott took while on a trip to India????
Or is it the wonderful oil painting of sea grass that my grandfather Milton painted on Martha's Vineyard in the 1960s???

Each one has their own story and memories all wrapped up in it.

When we found the 8x10 glossy of me on the field at Fenway wearing the 2004 World Series replica ring and one of the biggest smiles I can ever remember breaking out on purpose while IN FRONT OF and not BEHIND the camera (where I would much rather be....), I immediately blurted out - "That goes in the sports cave in the basement!"

For almost everything that we unwrapped I knew exactly where I would want to put it, based on either the subject matter, where the frame or colors would work best on which walls, or just where I wanted it based on how I wanted to feel in each room when I saw it.  Black or white, cut and dried, simple!