July 1979, Janet shot several photos on the porch of Small House of David Richmond, Stephen Gilson, and me.  Stephen and I lived in Small House.  By this time Janet had moved out to her own apartment.  She said that she needed space.  We had shared a large room over the porch and shared the house with five others.  I moved downstairs to the room behind the porch.  Stephen moved in after Janet left.  He studied English and writing.  He wrote poetry and was a good cook.  He was a ski instructor in the winter and played tennis in the summer.  David had been my friend since I moved next door to his house in Muscatine in 1969.  I grew up watching young women swoon around David.  I got to watch women swoon around Stephen in the co-op.  

I shot a few photos of Janet on this roll.  She looks pretty and distant, much as she does elsewhere.  I had no idea what was going on in her mind.  I was trying to make the marriage work.  Her new apartment was about a half-hour's walk west of the co-op on Olive Court.  I once had to walk over to tell her urgent news.  After a few minutes waiting for her to answer my knock, I found that she was with one of the professors from her social work school.  I told her that there was something I should tell her privately.  She said that anything I had to say to her I could say in front of her friend.  I told her that I had crab lice and that I had no idea where they came from.  Her friend blanched (hard to do with such pale skin) and took his exit.

I also shot a few photos of Allan Brink.  He had lived in the large room of Small House before I did and had moved two doors down to Big House.  He was an art student and interested in the new Iowa City punk scene.  He was a close follower of the band Pink Gravy.

The roll of film ends with a few other photos taken at Small House.  A picture I took of Stephen.  A few photos of Chuck Schuetze.  Chuck and I were friends from Cornell College and Altoona Hall.  He was a graduate student of philosophy at Iowa then.  That was a sad story, but one for him to tell - not me.

In between the Small House photos are a set of photos I shot at my grandparents house.  Granddad Pat was proud of his cattle.  He was an early adopter of Charlois to interbreed with Angus.  He had curated his own herd over years.  Pat was less proud of his youngest child, Uncle Jim.  These photos were taken soon after Jim's schizophrenia diagnosis.  I wasn’t sure then that the diagnosis was correct.  He had recently moved into a sheltered home, the recently closed county home.  I watched him adopt the habits and traits I’d seen in the residents of the Linn County Home two years earlier while volunteering.  Once a staunch anti-smoker, he became a chain smoker.  I learned much later that nicotine calms schizophrenics.  Jim had just been given a no-contact order against a woman he’d be fixated on for decades - Kim.  I don’t remember how she came onto his radar, but he never let go of the delusion that they would marry.  Jim struggled because he was always the failure in a family that struggled for success.  He thought that the rest of the family would respect him more if he began a family of his own.  And of course he had the same raging hormones that the rest of the Weston men had.  His outlet was a fantasy.  That didn’t stop him from repeatedly asking Janet about her sisters.

The photographs referenced in this essay can be found in the ‘photo by number’ section of my website, under the gallery “00035.”