A Punchcard Letter From My Sister
21 April 1972


A thick stacktop card
perfect sense
true communication
alien writing ftw
Calder bag from the Whitney

I was actually looking for something else when I found this. In something like 1990 or so I had a show of my paintings in New York. I aso collected a carrier bag full of fragments of layered, aged posters I tore off light poles, etc. I'm fairly sure I don't have them now, as I lost most of my groovy crapola, however when I saw this Calder bag in the garage I thought, "Aha!" and staggered into the kitchen with it.

When I looked inside I realised it was a bag of letters, but my "Damnation." turned to "!!!" when I saw my sister's punchcard letter. I'd been wanting to find it for some time. It just decided to find me - and only four days past its 38 year anniversary (although perhaps I received it on the 25th, which is the date I found it).

My sister was a total geek then, computers, scifi, Star Trek, super8 movie-making. I dunno what happened to her, as she's not terribly geeky now. Was it timing? She might've passed over computers as it was too early to do much with them unless one had bags of money. Are you out there, D? Did you ever think you'd see this letter again?

UPDATE: D says, "It's amazing how far things have come!!!! I had a few punch cards around but I don't know if they are still here or not. These look like museum pieces. Kids today would have a hard time recognizing that this was programming for a computer. We had to run these things through several times to get the bugs out. If you missed one step or even a word it had to be searched through and fixed. _ D"