Educational Values

Eleven tapes out of 16 are transcribed (with the prospect of maybe a dozen more coming next week), and the printer has told me he'll need my anthology copy by the week of the 20th. Taking a breather while I can....

The computer gods have been gracious. Mary's Zip drive is a newer edition than my old, now-insensate Zip drive, but I could still retrieve a gaggle of scans from years back into my old computer. There I compressed several hundred files before I temporarily swapped out my current computer's CD drive, put in a floppy drive, and used old floppy discs to transfer several megs worth of the compressed files. Then I swapped drives back and made a couple of CD backups.

Whew.

With the exception of the flowers in the foreground, everything in this collage comes from those Zip discs. All the buttons are Vietnam War-era, worn during my grade school (K-8) and high school days. I need to find them again; they're floating around the house somewhere in our chronic post-move discombobulation. I last wore them in 1999, when Mary and I attended a reunion at John Dewey High School to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its opening.

The building shots of P.S. 99 are from my visit, about 15 years ago, to the neighborhood where I grew up. I retraced my walk from home to school, about a half-dozen blocks, snapping pictures. The kids behind the windows come from class photos from the 4th, 5th, and 8th grade. And 2nd grade, though no faces show. (My own face is visible twice, from the 5th and 8th grade shots.)

The background "absence" card is from Dewey. The flowers in the foreground live outside one of our local libraries. I'd shot them with the digital camera on the same day I'd photographed the components for The Pursuit of Water.

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