Mike Mazur really never comes to my house. I took this picture the third or fourth time, at most, that he was here. Mostly, I see him at his house, or more likely, talk to him if he answers the phone when I call Gail, or if he gets on an extension and asks us when we're getting off.

Every spring I plead with Mike to paint my forsythia bush in the backyard. I watch it every day when I work at the kitchen table doing indexes. I love the way it slowly turns to yellow, starting a few days before the crocuses make their way through the mud. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to catch its minute nuances of more yellow on black and white film. Mike used to laugh at me. It's his nature, he'd say, to be blind to my forsythia [because I keep on pointing it out to him) and to be drawn to my trash barrels leaning against the exhausted iron fence. But lately, he's been saying, 'Next spring, maybe, Ellie.'

In 1966, after I'd been using the camera for a year, I took rolls and rolls of pictures of Mike and his model in his studio. Mike used some of them -- in the sense that any artist uses photographs -- in his series, 'Artist and Model,' a print of which is over the couch in several pictures. But I didn't get any psychic energy out of their usefulness to him. It goes to show that you can't predict which episodes will fall flat, leave you where you are, and which ones will make you soar. (And emphasizes my good luck in knowing Ginsberg, Creeley, Olson, and Blackburn at a tentative and critical time.)

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