Robert tracks me down at a cafe. “Doc Holliday sent me some more artwork. And I wanted you to see it.”
I get him a cup of coffee and bring it over to the table. He pulls a big manila envelope out of his bag and hands it to me. I empty its content out in front of me. A couple of dozen slides fall out.
I hold one up. The words “Greece” and “Hellas” (in Cyrillic letters) are stamped into the little white frame. It looks like it came from an educational filmstrip or some other commercially available slide show. I hold it up to a light so that I can make out the picture. It’s an image of a Greek ruin.
We go through the little pile one slide at a time. I look at the slide and describe it to him, then pass it along to Robert.
“Oh, that’s Greece? Interesting!” He squints carefully through the little window, letting it soak in. I’m not sure how much of the picture he can make out. (The word “Greece” will enter his vocabulary for a few days. “I was talking to this Greek guy . . .”)
There are a few more slides from the Greece series and there’s a batch of photos from Mt. Vesuvius, the captions printed on the frames are in Italian.
I come across the first personal slide in the collection and hold it up to the light, “This is a man. Who is this?”
“I don’t know.”
I look again and try to guess when the picture was taken based on the man’s clothes. Then I notice the fish. One would think that I’d notice the two foot long fish that he was holding out beside him in the classic, I caught this fish pose.
There were a few more images of the fisherman and his family and a batch of tourist photos - from Copenhagen according to the handwritten caption on the frames.
Robert will produce another pile of slides every day until his supply is exhausted. Though the subjects of the slides are limited to the Greece, Mt. Vesuvius, fisherman, and Copenhagen sets, each day’s show will be different.