NOTE - You can see other pictures for 2004 by clicking on any  of the images in the side bar, and then click the "2004" link to see the 4-page album.  If you then click on the small pictures you'll get the full impact, with commentary.  If you start the slide show, it's less effort, but you miss all the commentary.  I apologize for the tricksiness, not my fault.

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One more time --

Hello all of you out there in Holidayland! As usual you are hearing from Enid and me after the old year has gone out with the trash, and thanks to email much of our year's doings won't be news to you anyway. Nevertheless I enjoy the opportunity for a contemplative wrap-up, and if this letter is rather long, it is only (as the French philosopher put it) that I do not have the time to write a short one.

Let's call 2004 the Year of New Jobs. In my role as great leader I went first, when the American Museum of Natural History closed down Micro Press in mid-2003 to make space for the cancerous growth of IT. They were happy to agree to my proposal to take staff, stuff, copyrights and all and set up as an independent nonprofit publisher, as this saved them the cost of hiring a dumpster. In a nod to our original WPA title in the 1930's (see "history"on www.micropress.org), we became "The Micropaleontology Project", and I accepted my kind offer of the job of President, on top of Editor in Chief. While interminable legal matters were being hashed out, the Museum made space for us (five people, and too many file cabinets) in half of a basement store room. Alas, the other half was filled with 20 skids or more of bite-size Mars Bars, Three Musketeers and Milky Ways left over from a Halloween party. I know what you're thinking! But nibble as we might we couldn't make a dent in it during the 5 months we spent there in our makeshift office, and were happy to see it carted off finally to give cavities to the poor. In February, finally, we moved to lower Fifth Avenue at 28th Street, where we have the entire 4th floor of a lovely old 1880's office building, its front covered with terra cotta scrolls and columns. According to Enid's show biz Uncle Harvey, we're on the corner of Tin Pan Alley, where such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and their agents, producers and publishers created the great Broadway shows of bygone days. Things change, and now it's all junk jewelry wholesalers and Indian restaurants. It's nice to know that you're walking through history every morning, but I am busier than ever, with more, not fewer, worries. This is retirement?

Apparently, Enid thought that economic uncertainty and a huge work load looked like fun, because effective 1/1/2005 she also handed in her notice at AMNH, giving up a cushy tenured job to become Chief Curator at the Museum for African Art. This is an enormous task because this organization, founded 20 years ago as the Center for African Art by her friend Susan Vogel, initially in lower Manhattan and now in temporary quarters in Long Island City, is making plans to grow into a 100,000-square foot facility to be built on a very well placed vacant lot at the upper end of Museum Mile, on Fifth Avenue where Harlem meets Central Park. Enid looks forward to working with top people, advising on the design of the new building, helping to acquire collections, and setting up the curatorial organization needed for full museum accreditation. Her biggest job, and fortunately the one she enjoys the most, will be creating exhibitions in coordination with guest curators and designers, and negotiating the loans to make them happen. I think I would faint from terror at the enormity of it all, but she is absolutely invigorated, and has plans afoot in a dozen different new projects. She'll be keeping an office as curator emerita at AMNH, but after spending literally half her life there she really likes the idea of doing something new while she still has "a few good years" to spend on it.

Taking kids in order of youth, we begin with two more new jobs the work of the twin graduates, whose commencements in midsummer were as momentous as one could hope for. Alicia, as we write, is being very traditional without perhaps meaning to. It's the done thing, if you listen to the stories of everyone who is anyone in the world of creative arts -- yes, even those who graduate as she did from NYU Tisch --  to start off as a mere grub in the industry, working in the mail room or at some hey-you job, until lightning strikes and there you are, rich and famous. Seen in this light she is obviously destined for success with a suitably menial and ill paid job as an assistant to the producers in a Santa Monica studio where they make clever commercials. When she can, she works to finish editing her student film. As some of you know, her first one was lost when the camera equipment was stolen. The beach is just a bike ride away, she keeps her eyes and ears open, her two bosses are nice, and all in all she rather enjoys it. Meanwhile she has discovered yet another major talent: the bosses are very serious about parties, and Alicia turns out to be one of the best party organizers ever. This is not necessarily the road to follow in life, of course, but it never hurts to have another string to your bow.

Benjamin's major in economics at Oberlin gave him a toe hold on his chosen ladder, but it was his sheer brilliance and dazzling personality (it's all in the genes) that saw him through a rigorous recruitment process to land a position -- also ridiculously ill paid -- at Morningstar security analysts in Chicago. He likes the work so much that he has already started to study for the CFA (certified financial analyst) exam, which I have to say seems like a really roundabout way to meet girls. It was fun helping him move, and we were really impressed with his new home town. Enid remembers it last from 35 years ago, and I even earlier as a teen ager visiting from California, as street after gritty street of box-like, soot-stained two story houses packed side by side and dimly seen through a pungent brown haze of coal smoke. No more! It's clean, with a magnificent downtown, and tingling with urban verve. We celebrated with a dinner at Charlie Trotter's that cost as much as Ben's first month's rent, but truly a meal to remember. They even had a special menu printed "Congratulations Benjamin!".

You could say Elizabeth has a new job lined up as well -- that of married person. She will not formally take office until this coming March, now fast approaching, but she and Huggy Bear (er, Henrik) have already moved into a wonderful 2-story flat in Basterfield House, an architecturally eminent modernist development not far from Smithfield Market, the most up and coming district in London. Henrik will continue teaching journalism and media at Roehampton University in London's West End while E completes her doctorate on internet search engines at London School of Economics, where they met. And then we'll see, I guess. He's been fascinated by the Wild West ever since he was a kid in Sweden, with a thing for Zane Grey novels, but she loves London. Hm, we can always hope for a geographic compromise when the day comes to move, and I don't mean New Jersey. Struggle, Henrik we're behind you.

Unfortunately for our theme, two of the kids did not lose their jobs this year. David continued his commute from Berkeley to Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, where he performs mysteries. He took a break in August to accompany daughter Ariel (age 4) and her adoring grampa to the annual family bash in Grants Pass, where we enjoyed seeing all available nieces, cousins, and siblings. Some of us greying ones drove on up to Roseburg to spend a very nostalgic day taking Mom's brat sister Charlotte out for lunch. In true family style it was nothing but hamburgers under an umbrella at a roadside stop, but nobody ever had a better meal as we sat there making fun of each other and falling over laughing with Aunt C, as usual, the worst of us. For drive time with Ariel I had fetched along a pile of my favorite kid books - ah, at last, a new audience! - but she had her own Krishna comics from the Indian grocery in Berkeley and was having none of Mother Goose. OK, to be truthful I found the Ramayana in cartoon form to be rather fun. So if the hero has a blue skin and wears a sarong. In my day he wore a cape and leaped over buildings with a single bound, which is even more silly. We had a fine time.

Anne also gainfully continued, doing her thing as an independent massage therapist. This year, the cute little cottage in Sag Harbor, out at the "upper end" of Long Island, took on the aspect of those old VW ads where there is no way all that stuff can be in there. Mainly it's grandson Malcolm (age 13) who has started to expand upwards and outwards, towards dimensions unknown. His home schooling is getting tougher -- Mal soaks up math like a sponge, and mom's Berkeley BA seems not to have included algebra, somehow -- but the local authorities have been whipped into line and tutors will be provided. Then there's great-niece Chelsea, on long term loan from Oregon. It's true she hasn't added any noticeable pounds at Sag Harbor High. This is no doubt due to the emaciation rays coming from the nearby Hamptons, where skeletal millionairesses make the Grim Reaper look like Porky Pig. That said, Chelsea's new sculptures are not exactly tiny, and her her departure for college in the fall may involve heavy equipment.

Eldest son Tony has not just one new job but several, all of his own creation, now that he has finished the three year process of selling his domain name company to Verisign. Sometimes he is a photographer, and goes on trips to the Amazon and South Africa with this bat society. Their objectives certainly lead them to unusual and interesting places, and Tony has secured some amazing photos, including a few that have been published in the better bat magazines. At other times he is a consultant on internet matters, for example to a group in Italy who are creating an "intelligent" self-improving program for thinking up new domain names. These and other interests keep him hopping, and now that he has acquired a share in a Paris apartment to go with his new digs in downtown Manhattan, our lunch dates may be more frequent because more difficult to arrange. (It works like that.)

We continue to enjoy  our excursions abroad -- Egypt (for me) in the spring was followed by a brief but wonderful trip to China, thanks to a friend with an apartment in Shanghai. In the summer  we went to an international geological congress in Florence, which gave us an excuse to take a rather strange Montenegran holiday (see "Splashing in the Adriatic" below). In December, finally, we went as lecturers on an air safari from Casablanca to Cape Town, stopping en route to see Tuaregs in Timbuktu, mud mosques on the Niger, masked dancers in a Dogon village, voudou and water towns on stilts in Benin, pygmies and elephants in the rainforest of the Central African Republic, tropical beaches and old colonial mansions on the island of Principe, and the spectacular desert scenery of Namibia. OK, I wound up getting mugged in broad daylight on a crowded street corner in Durban,  but all it cost us was a few credit cards and our self-image as "old Africa hands". Another painful blow to self-image was the shocking confirmation, on our China trip, of the dumbass mistake described in "Treasures untold" -- alas, nobody is a bigger fool than the expert.

Wishing all a happy, prosperous, and infinitely more peaceful 2005!

John and Enid