Something is Not. Quite. Right.

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

I settled into the attic late this morning. Before sitting down to work, I put on Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly and made sure my water bottle was 3/4 of the way full (a separate story). I had decided to start looking for photos Lenny had placed in the blue binder, chapter by chapter. And would you know that I could not find the Cover Photo??! My eyes were really straining after having gone through all of the slides once, to no avail. I did find one image that was close but the position of the tug was different. Does it matter? Will anyone even know the difference?

It matters to me.

So I went through all of the images a second time. No luck. Damn.

I tried to convince myself not to panic but it definitely felt like a false start. I began talking to myself a little: just move on for now and locate the other images. The cover will turn up at some point. No biggie. Things don’t always have to happen in sequence. I put a couple of beautiful (similar) shots in the folder, thinking they could be contenders for an alternate cover and I moved on to the photos assigned to the Introduction. And that’s when I started to panic.

The second image in the binder also did not appear to be among the slides I scanned! I did two checks. Did Lenny place the chosen slides somewhere else? This was not the exciting, the fun endeavor that I had envisioned it to be but Ms. Flack soothed me a bit with her voice and I decided to check one more time. And I found it. I wonder: is there an easier way to do this? Not sure but for now, onward.

I was able to find the third image rather quickly, even though the print was rather dark and so it didn’t seem especially striking. But when I found the image on the laptop, it was brighter, sharper, and understood why Lenny had selected it. Some of the photos he printed had captions assigned to them. I will definitely keep that, as it is part of the narration - “the photographic journey”, as Lenny put it.

I managed to find slides for most of the Introduction, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2. And then my living alarm went off: the piercing whines of Juney, a creature suffering through the pain of loneliness in the family room. And so I descended the stairs but felt energized and anxious to resume my work.