Sarah Van Name
7. Cloverleaf passes
I want the feel of a full tank of gas and a couple just out of college. These photos should show the fifteen-year-old driving too slowly under his father’s tutelage and the same boy two years later getting pulled over by a state trooper. These are the smaller details, and as you should know by now, necessary: the couple’s hands intertwined, their fingers reminiscent of the loops of the highway that spirals over and around them, the shakiness of the boy’s movements as he pulls away.
But we also need the bigger picture. Get the aerial shots, the ones showing the beautiful ballet of the cars weaving in their lanes under and through. In the daytime, in the orange dusk, and at night with the red and the yellow.
8. “Fit for the likes of us”
A certain understanding of what’s suitable and what crosses lines. A blonde girl grows up in a suburb. Her mother works part-time as an office manager, her father makes business trips. For lunch she eats peanut butter and jelly or ham and cheese on Wonder bread, with an apple and a bag of low-fat chips. She drinks skim milk at dinner and is asleep by midnight.
One day when she’s fifteen, her mother puts a mango in her lunch instead of an apple. When she bites into it, soft orange juice drips down her chin. This is the kind of thing that leads to the learning of curse words, and music with drums, and unprotected sex.