I can almost repeat word for word General Douglas MacArthur although in my case I am just a badly fixed b+w print that started to fade some years ago but much more of late.

I am closing my 52 years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all of my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that "old soldiers never die; they just fade away."

And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.

General Douglas MacArthur -19 April 1951

But while I never experienced any military campaigns I have had access to interesting situations through the astounding access that photography used to bring to a magazine photographer before film went out the window and photographs no longer fade they just corrupt.

The pictures in this blog I took in April 1999 before M went back to her Montreal. I took the pictures and filed them. Only now have I come to realize that M had besides the skill of a dancer she had that difficult to define but easy to notice quality that I call presence.

This is not the first time that I have combined my photographs of a dancer with Emily Dickinson’s famous poem. I did that here.