Friends From the Future
Four women, three photos, two paintings, one apricot scone
Thursday night, Washington DC, a little after 10pm. Maybe sixty of us are ascending the stairs from the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where we have just watched the founders of The Innocence Project receive The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Later, I will tell Matt Welch I was moved by the video of those who’d been wrongly incarcerated, some on death row for decades, explaining what freedom means to them: to be able to start anew, to be able to drive a car, to be able to take a bath.
But now we are on the heated balcony, having one and two more drinks, and I am meeting people I have long-admired, including Scott Lincicome, who is so quick and funny I spend ten minutes doing nothing but laugh; it’s a beautiful night, including the Washington Monument beaming its light. At around 11pm I want a closer look, and head for a ledge at the balcony’s end. It is not so high that I cannot boost myself up, and I am trying and failing to get a good picture of the monument when I hear someone say, “Give me your phone.”
A woman is standing below me. She is wearing a red halter dress and has her hair in a pixie cut. I hand her my phone and smile for the picture.
“No,” she says. “Look where you were looking.”
And so I look toward the monument, and then I hop down, and she and I start to talk, very fast, for ten, fifteen minutes, that instant connection of wanting to talk about everything right now.
“Let’s get together soon,” she later texts, after I send her the photo, which I also send to a friend, who writes back, “A beautiful photo. But what really makes it is: What IS she looking at?”
“The future,” I tell her.
“Live today to the fullest because tomorrow is not promised” is the email signature of Sabrina T., the first person who contacts me after the drowning death of Eldon Smith. It’s May 27th, 2009. Four days earlier, Eldon’s mother Amanda Stott-Smith had thrown Eldon and his sister from the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, a story I immediately started to report on. Sabrina has read one of these reports and contacts me to say, her son had been Eldon’s best friend at pre-school. She and I and her son will meet soon after at a coffee shop. She will bring me Eldon’s class picture, of which I will write in To the Bridge, a True Story of Motherhood and Murder:
Sabrina kept the preschool class photo on the refrigerator at home. Eldon, she thought, was the most adorable of the whole class, a cherub with big round dark eyes and the apple cheeks of a young child. He looked a lot like his mother. Sabrina did not know Amanda well, only what she had gathered by attending class meetings with her. Amanda was striking, with a Native American or Hawaiian or Polynesian look, and that beautiful hair. The first time Sabrina spoke with Eldon, she ran her hands over his hair; it was clipped very short, prickly and soft. She was so happy to meet this boy her son was taken with, and she said, “You’re Eldon, hi!” And he had been sweet and quiet, very quiet.
In 2013, the documentary Finding Vivian Maier is released. I post something about it, a post that Sabrina sees. The post includes a photo Maier had taken:
Seeing it catalyzes something in Sabrina, who will tell me that in grade school her art teacher told her she was talentless; told her to forget becoming an artist. And so she had. Until she saw the photo, when started to paint, and has not stopped.
In 2018, To the Bridge is on the cusp of publication. I have cleared all the photos for usage but one: the class picture of Eldon, whose parents own the rights. His mother is in prison and his father will not communicate with me.
“I’ll draw him for you,” Sabrina says, and does, it’s on page 45 of the book, and about which she writes, “I was bringing him back to life the only way I could.”
I am sitting in my living room earlier this week with Kat Rosenfield, whose new book, No One Will Miss Her has just been named an Amazon pick and for whom I will be throwing a book launch this month. We are talking about where she and I will sit for the author talk and I notice she cannot stop looking at a painting above my head.
“Who did that?” she asks. “I’m obsessed.” I tell her, my friend Sabrina, who would not only not take any money from me when I first saw it but who, when she saw the Washington Monument pic, wrote to say, “I have to do an assignment sort of like that, and if you're okay with it, I'd like to paint it.”
All these open hands, all these friends from the future, now I will put Kat in touch with Sabrina. And I will again see, inshallah, the girl with the red halter dress and pixie-cut, who, when I looked her up, has had many health troubles, who said as we spoke in the moonbeams, “I want to know you.”
Recs this week:
Podcast: 1865, an old-timey radio serial sort of podcast that I am obsessed with
Book: The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, which is of course creating all kinds of controversy, and which our pals Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal talked about this week over at Blocked and Reported, including an interview with author Kathryn Paige Harden
More pods: Speaking of Jesse, check out this absolutely banging episode of Ethan Strauss’s House of Strauss, during which I laughed so hard I had to stop walking
Speaking of Katie, she was the guest of the Fifth Column boys this week, talking about the latest dog-park incident and what the hell was up with Ozy. I got to toddle into the studio in my nightgown (hey, it was midnight!) and say hi, and earlier, was in there with Michael Moynihan, to discuss our mutual antipathy for the New Yorker’s David Remnick soft-balling that radio interview with pipeline-bomber enthusiast Andreas Malm, about which I wrote and YouTubed last week
Full video here. And don’t sleep on the Paloma Media podcast, where Matt especially is burning up the wires, with three audio readings of his Reason pieces this week, “House Votes To Make Your Daughters Eligible for the Military Draft,” “New York Firing Health Care Workers as COVID-19 Heads Northeast,” and “Vaccine Mandates Coming for K-12 Students.”
Last rec is total niche, the scones at Bread Alone in Rhinebeck, New York, from which vicinity I bid you adieu until next time xx
Wow. I LOVE that picture of you. I almost typed "pic" but it is a terrible unworthy word for such an image.