I want to thank all of the good people out there who contributed to George Forss’s Kickstarter Project The Way We Were. George has raised more than $13,000 on Kickstarter, and more from a private donor. There are still nine days to go to fund his project, but George is not checking his money, he’s off and running on his book. Today, we reviewed the book contract from his publisher, who will design and publish George’s book, a collection of mostly unseen and brilliant photographs of the New York landscape before 911.

George has been reborn. He was always active, always creative, always busy, but there is a new gleam in his eye and a focus to his work. He has a new lease on life, a chance to publish some of his great photographs. Every morning, at 8 a.m. he is in his dark room with  his chemicals and tubes and tanks, refining his photos, working to do them and re-do them, to make them perfect. He calls me at 8:30, excited, passionate to tell me he has made a breakthrough with this print and that print, using this technique or that. I never understand George’s techniques, they are beyond me. George’s darkroom is a dark feast of smells and sounds and beeping lights, only he knows what is connected to what.

But I understand the excitement in his voice. “It is like being born again,” he said, “this is the best time of my life.” He hasn’t even mentioned the aliens for a few days. George saves clippings about the New York Carriage Horses for me, he is e-mailing my posts to his friends in New York, tormenting them (many do not believe the horses should remain in the city.) Every afternoon I stop by to see the work he has done, it is usually hanging above the sink in the downstairs bathroom, an annex to his dark room.

This George’s work, his life’s passion, his destiny. He will create a great book, his own book and it will do well, I know it. He will be selling copies of his book at the second Bedlam Farm Open House on Columbus Day weekend, and I will be selling copies of Saving Simon: How A Rescue Donkey Taught Me The Meaning Of Compassion. Battenkill Books is coming to the farm to set up a table for both of us, we will do a joint talk and signing together.

I love watching George’s courageous and unflagging determination, he has had many reasons to give up on his life, he never has, he never will. His ambition for the end of his life is to be taken away by an alien spaceship and whizzed off to another place in the universe. “I’ll be the one chasing after the ship and yelling take me, take me!,” he often tells me.

I told him that would be a great Kickstarter project in itself. “Oh,” he said.