“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Copyright Len Harris - 1983
Sunday, January 3, 2021
I woke up this morning feeling restless. I am playing the waiting game regarding tracking down Jan Stacy and/or his family. It’s a barrier, in my mind, to the end product I am so set on. So it’s bothering me. I need to become comfortable with uncertainty and learn to practice patience.
So I decided to switch my focus back to Lenny’s slides - there are still so many of them left to scan. I also grudgingly spoke with my parents via the Amazon Echo Show, which I am convinced is a spying device. They mentioned that they had opened another one of Lenny’s boxes and that they found some documents and more photos. I decided that, should the snow let up, that I would head over to see what’s there. In the meantime, I made my way back up to the attic at about 10:30. I decided to play an old Donna Summer record, “Live and More”, that I have to admit I had never listened to. I found it at a thrift store years back and grabbed it for a dollar. I knew enough to know it was an album I should have. I don’t know for a fact that Lenny listened to her music but I want to believe that he did. Ms. Summer sure does a lot of talking on this album but it was a live recording during a concert. It made me feel like she was in the room.
I have to say that listening to records while working is ideal in the sense that it requires that I take screen breaks in order to hear the B Side or switch albums. Keeps me in check.
As I was scanning today, what I noticed (and smiled about) was the fact that Lenny took several nature shots and most of them were of trees by the water at sunrise or sunset. He really worked well with natural light and his interest in trees only makes me think more about my newfound fascination with them. My current read is: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. The writer tells of how trees are not only alive but social creatures. I am very moved by this. One of my hopes this year is to blow the dust (literally) off of my camera case, self-teach myself the basics (overcoming my fear of the camera as a piece of technology), and then go out and photograph old trees in my neighborhood. It’s a dream that needs to become a bud.
One other thing I learned from scanning today is that several of Lenny’s slides were kinda blurry or “off” in some ways. This is a great reminder to me that great artists produce a lot of material that is “blah blah” or “eh” and that allows them to see and appreciate the real jewels when they are created. I feel this way about my writing. Sometimes, I feel like I’m “on point", which is wondrous, but it’s the times when things turn out just “so so” or are “off” that matter just as much.
The New York Tugboats: an illustrated history by George Matteson arrived in the afternoon. It looks pretty comprehensive and well executed and I was relieved to discover that it consists of much more writing than photographs. I will work to find time to slowly reading through it, but only after I finish reading Jan Stacy’s chapters. It is part of my goal for tomorrow. Tomorrow, the kiddos “return” to school (their rooms) so I imagine I won’t get a whole lot done so I think reading Stacy’s text is ambitious enough. And I still want to scan at least 60 more slides.
I did make it to my parents’ and the box contained more slides. My mom thinks most of them are portraits and some of them are labeled but I do not want to miss any tugboat images that may be mixed in so I am going to look through all of them regardless. Once again, as I looked over a couple of them before leaving, I noticed they had that label: Manhattan Views, Inc. and an alpha-numeric code. I am going to have to figure out what this is all about. My dad and I started to put our detective hats on, tapping on our phones but I soon realized that we were both too tired to be productive. I suppose it is another thing I can work on tomorrow…or actually, probably the day after. Wanna follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice.
