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What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees? I don't know. But it seemed the thing to do in that first week in January 1964, and I got two other people to join me. One of them wants to remain anonymous, and that's all right. I think we were still in shock over President Kennedy's assassination. Perhaps that had something to do with all those photographs of Christmas trees. The Christmas of 1963 looked terrible, illuminated by all the flags in America hanging at half-mast week after week in December in a tunnel of mourning. I was living by myself in a very strange apartment where I was taking care of an aviary for some people who were in Mexico. I fed the birds every day and changed bird water and had a little vacuum cleaner to tidy up the aviary when it was needed. I ate dinner by myself on Christmas day. I had some hot dogs and beans and drank a bottle of rum with Coca-Cola. It was a lonesome Christmas and President Kennedy's murder was almost like one of those birds that I had to feed every day. The only reason I am mentioning this is to kind of set the psychological frame for 390 photographs of Christmas trees. A person does not get into this sort of thing without sufficient motivation.
Late one evening I was walking home from visiting some people on Nob Hill. We had sat around drinking cup after cup of coffee until our nerves had become lionesque. I left around midnight and walked down a dark and silent street toward home, and I saw a Christmas tree abandoned next to a fire hydrant. thanks to consumptive.org |