Overdue

The weather has at last become decent again. Last Sunday I found much more to photograph in Abernathy, a town that was quite nasty in the past, if you were of the wrong color. This is something my wife remembers. Seems at one time, back in the fifties, the whites of Abernathy decided to make life miserable for the few people of color and run 'em out of town. They succeeded. Of course, that was a long time ago, and the generation responsible is now at last mostly dead, and good riddance to them. Modern Abernathy is not much like that anymore, as far as I know. It is also mostly dead, however-- amazing the number of derelict structures that were once businesses. Abernathy used to host a monthly music festival. That's gone. That's been gone for a long time. I am still processing the photos I took in little Abernathy. But I took some Sunday before last at our church ground-breaking ceremony. We were among the few who were not enthusiastic about the plans to expand. It meant taking on debt, for one thing. And our church was the right size to be friendly. It's not like there aren't an abundance of churches in Lubbock. We don't like the tendency to grow into a mega-church. We are not keen to belong to a vast throng in a huge building. But the decision was made and there's nothing we can do about it. So we decided to be part of the ground-breaking ceremony, in which those assembled pull a tractor with ropes. Not as many people showed up as expected, and those who did appear, like us, point to a demographic problem-- the average age was probably around sixty. One interesting thing: this church moved to its present site about twenty years ago. The photos taken then were all in analog format. Today all photos and videos were in digital format, and there was a DRONE flying around, using technology that didn't even exist twenty years ago. We are in a time of exponential change, and the next twenty years will be nothing like the last twenty.

In fact, most of us were using some form of smart phone to take our pics.