Something different as I work through the process of settling my friend Bill's affairs. His bank and old employer need a death certificate (easy). We've picked a date for a cocktail celebration of Bill's life (emotionally harder). And now it's time to find an estate sales firm to handle a house full of furniture and possessions. I have no idea how the latter works but I know I'm not the first person to go down this path.

Backstory: Bill was 95. And as a gay man of a certain age, he had eclectic and oftentimes exquisite tastes. His house was filled with antiques, shiny objects, chinoiserie, and touristy kitsch from Hawaii. And he had a chair that, sometime in the 1950s, on a drunken night, somehow left the lobby of the Palace Hotel and ended up in Bill's living room.

Anyway, this is a snapshot I took a decade ago, in said living room, taken through the very dirty viewfinder of a Kodak Duaflex TLR, using a Pentax DSLR pointed downward. In a nutshell, this is Bill.

#photography