I’ll be writing “thank you”s until Thanksgiving.

“Thank you for adding a few days onto your visit from Atlanta to be in town for this.”

“Thank you for driving from Nazareth, PA with your wife and year-old baby.”

“Thank you for smoke-screening/distracting me with a road trip to a terrific photo show at the Center for Photography in Woodstock in Kingston (I know!) so family and friends had time to prep the C.R.E.A.T.E. Studio on Erie Boulevard in Schenectady to host my surprise birthday party.”

And, most of all, “Thank you Ellie for rounding up such a wonderful crew of friends and family.” (A friend since high school looked around and dubbed them all my ‘pride,’ like a gang of lions.) “And thank you for organizing the facility, the guests, the food and drink, and a pop up exhibit of my framed photos.”

My sister Annie (in black, and necklace) and her husband Dave (in Martin Guitars shirt)

The last time Ellie organized a surprise birthday party for me, she arranged for the Auratones, my musician brother Jim Hoke’s high school band, to reunite for their first gig in decades. Seeing the same guys who used to practice in our basement playing the same songs moved me to tears more than once. Then, on their break, she led everybody through the woods at the former Glenville Girls Inc. day-camp she’d borrowed for the occasion, into a clearing where people casually started looking up. 

Soon a biplane appeared and performed astounding aerobatic maneuverers overhead while the pilot’s wife directed him by radio: “Go up, you’re behind the trees again!” Hammerhead stalls, barrel rolls; you name it, Jeff did it. 

Ellie blindfolded me, handed me a ribbon to guide me through the woods to the pond where the ribbon’s other end was tied to the thwart of my birthday gift yellow canoe.

Meanwhile a woman sidled up to Ellie and snarled in mock rage, “You BITCH! My Fred’s birthday is in two weeks and NO WAY can I do anything half as cool as this!” But I digress – in fact, my sister had those words – But I digress – printed on a gift T-shirt; she also gifted me our great grandfather’s bamboo walking stick with silver band and tip. But I digress again.

I walked into C.R.E.A.T.E. Studio Sunday afternoon with my smokescreen/distractor friend Charles and found it full of family and friends and food and drinks, my photos on the display walls along with a highly flattering artist statement Ellie and our son Zak wrote.

My “pride”:

Ellie, son Zak and wife Charlotte; daughter Pisie and husband Tony; sister Annie, husband Dave, their sons Jared and Noah, Jared’s wife Corrin and their son Waylon; and Noah’s partner Maria; my high school friends Ray, Tom and Bob; Charles and Ginger; John and Peg; Dennis and Mary Ann; Caleb and Linda; Jack and Dave; John-Michael and Gail; Monica and Steve; Louisa; Don and Lois; Michael and Jackie; Eric and Jess; Meredith; Paul; John and Khushi; Matthew; Anna and Mareesa; Helen – well, two Helens, one with Don – Susan; Ricardo; Jim and Teresa, Tim and Chickie; the RZA, and Needle – 54, plus me.

Brother Jim – you remember, the Auratones guy – and wife Lisa didn’t make it since they’d arranged months ago their annual weeks-long getaway to California’s Anza-Borrego desert.

The sheer fact of this happening at all, that was Surprise No. 1.

Surprise No. 2 was the wonderful sight of all those friends and family; all the loved ones of my “pride.”

And, Surprise No. 3 was the exhibit of my own photos, many taken from our own walls to hang at C.R.E.A.T.E. Studio after Charles had smoke-screened me away to Kingston. 

Some images I hadn’t seen in years, including a few that friends had brought, or sent. A woman whose own family gathering in New Hampshire prevented her from joining us shipped two photos I’d gifted her so long ago I didn’t recognize where I’d shot them. And I was equally touched when Dave told me he still has a kinetic onstage shot of James Hatfield of Metallica that I’d shot at the RPI Fieldhouse, hanging on a wall at his home near Boston.

No music shots in this pop-up exhibit, though; it was all family and friends and landscapes I love: a late-sun-splashed island in Heron Lake, New Mexico; an Oklahoma City tavern; a tall-grass meadow near Little Falls with a barn that seemed to have grown there; the Colorado sand dunes; Sacandaga Lake with ice in the foreground paralleling low clouds over water in the distance; a street on Buyukada Island in the Sea of Marmara between Yalova and Istanbul. Those photos launched dozens of conversations. 

A few photos showed me: in one, I’m quaffing a beer in a Yokohama bar, no beard yet

Nothing less than this magnificent gathering could have kept me from seeing John Doyle, and the Murphy Beds, at Music Haven. (The John Doyle at my surprise birthday party wasn’t the same John Doyle who played Music Haven, but rather one of Ellie’s favorite cousins.)

But I digress.