In my senior year of high school, I was sent to live with my grandparents, because I was being difficult. One of the upsides to this was that when I went to the new school, they asked me what classes I wanted to take, something that had never happened before. I’m pretty sure that’s because I was on some sort of college track, which kept putting me in upper-level math and science courses, which I kept nearly failing.

It turned out that you could take classes in drawing, ceramics, and photography. There was even something called “Interdisciplinary Environmental Science” which included a week (in the dead of winter) at the NJ State Ecological center where I slept in an unheated cabin and hiked all day.

But eggs. George Torgesson taught photography. I was by no means new to photography, dragging my grandfather’s loaner Leica IIIg and Weston light meter around everywhere, but to actually take it as a course. Cool. Only, it turned out I didn’t really like assignments. As a journalist, which I’ve been, shooting to support a story is fine. But being told to be creative always makes me grind to a halt. So the first assignment George gave us was to find a creative way to photograph an egg.

I just spent the last hour going through old contact sheets to see if I still had those shots, but alas, I only go back to the camera I bought after I graduated and got a job, a Nikormat SLR. What I remember was the frustration in trying to get something interesting out of an egg, and that whatever I turned in was something that didn’t tell any kind of story to me.

I took a lot of pictures that year, though they seem to have gone the way of things, and there were some, often of my friends, long-haired war protesting types, that I liked quite well. But the pictures that have always interested me most are things that just catch my eye.

Like a bowl of hard-boiled eggs cooling in the sink.