During Max's freshman year of high school, it became apparent that it was time to get our youngest son off the information superhighway and on to the open road. While synergy with cyberspace can be predictive of a fine financial future, the ability to manipulate graphical data does not equal understanding and understanding is what will make our son's world a better place. His will be a society with a white minority, increasingly threatened resources and, perhaps a burgeoning and disenfranchised population as the chasm between the can and can-nots, the have and have-nots, deepens. While one day Max may be empowered by his high tech handiness, it is our task to endow him with compassion for the human condition; passion for the principals of equality, value, and peace; and tolerance for that and those that seem alien and incomprehensible.

As our scheme grew from a what-if to a real plan, we began to see that there were many more opportunities embedded in our quest that might fulfill our own needs as artists and communicators. Disenchantment with making big business look better than it does had once driven us to abandon two decades of a lucrative annual report photography career to shoot self-assigned projects. Now we were ready for new challenges for ourselves as well as our son. The (photographic) goal was not to have a goal, lest it color every experience. We knew we wanted to follow our noses and harvest creative crops in the most unlikely fields. Mark Twain once said, "You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.". Whether our chosen tool was a computer, a camera, or the almighty pen, we wanted to sharpen our creative sight.

Home during our odyssey was a bus-style RV which we retrofitted with computers, scanner, printer, camera and film storage, cell phone, dish antenna, desk space, litter box and dog bed. Books on tape, educational videos and software, textbooks, camcorder, TV/VCR, sporting gear, emergency equipment, spare parts, tools, housewares, food, clothing for all seasons and even a 8 foot step ladder were crammed into every unoccupied space. With family pets in figurative tow and a 4-wheel drive in literal tow, we pulled out late one midsummer night and made it to a nearby Denny's off the interstate. But we had done it! We were history....at least for a year.

"Postcards from the Moon...places you know you've been but can't remember when" was conceived, given life and nurtured during our meanderings. Demonstrating to our son that there was art in the most insignificant places; that the art was in you and not in the subject, brought us, mere grown-ups, into our own maximized focus. Vision and creation would never be the same. As for Max, upon re-entering public high school, he won the Scholastic Silver Key award in our state for his photographic portfolio produced while a "drop-out", and his academic portfolio won him full credit for his sophomore year. Many of his individual images went on to win exhibition and gallery prizes and will be featured in future "Postcard" offerings.

As for Max's lessons in humanity, they also win kudos. In an English class essay he wrote shortly after his re-entry into life's regular rigors, he said "kids" in our town think they live in the middle of nowhere because they have to drive 15 minutes to a cineplex. They don't, not even close. I know because I've truly been in the middle of nowhere. I've met people who contributed big-time to the winning of WW2 now living in poverty and still honoring the American flag each time they get together. I've seen people who go through trash cans for their daily meal who still treated me kindly. I've heard people patriotically praising the United States on the 4th of July who are the descendants of slaves, here in the "home of the free!"

More than being proud of our photography, we are proud of our son.