With Smudge In Yard

“Sunday Morning” featured a piece about “Our Town” last week. It’s reportedly the most produced play in America, maybe because it calls for so little scenery, but more likely because it touches on that sinking realization we all have sometimes that we are failing to “realize life while (we) live it,” that we aren’t appreciating who and what we have while we have them. Then the phone rings, the incoming email dings, and we forget again.

This positive image from a rare glass negative came from a friend’s family collection. It traveled over time to her without a chip, but also without a name or date or anything about the forgotten relatives who owned it. Studying the carving on the rocker, the little mat underneath, the dog’s round metal tag, the name plates by the screen door, the rooms of hidden objects behind, I think these were somebody’s “clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths …” These were somebody’s ordinary and everyday, and maybe they appreciated them, and maybe they didn’t, and now they’re all gone, all save this photo.

Mistakes — mistakes are my favorite. Fingers in the frame, the photographer’s shadow blotting out the subject, the subject’s head cut off … This one gallops right past incompetent and back around toward sort of weirdly artistic, or at least intentional. Funny, even sweet, because someone kept it anyway.

I joke about having antiques-store ESP. There’s no possible way to look at every single thing without going into a blood-sugar episode or getting a migraine, so I’ll say, “I’m going to find a birthday gift for Robin.” And then I will. A few weeks ago, I was eating supper in my kitchen, and I said, “I wish I had a yellow metal rolling cart like Grandma Hayes used to have.” I promptly forgot about it, then walked right up to one the next day. Christmas shopping with my friend Shannon recently at a great old warehouse of a place in Edinburgh (Indiana, of course), I said, “This is where I found my orange Carnival juice glasses a few years ago. I could use some more of those.” And there they were, one aisle over. Shannon marveled.

It’s a random talent, only marginally useful, but I’ll take what I can get. Dog photos, like books fallen open in the middle, give me the same weird feeling a lot of times, a vague intuition. This one in particular gives off a feeling of unease, with its weird pitching angle, its dog cowering on a strange perch, its dark slash of a man silhouetted at right. What is he doing there, that forbidding shadow blotting out the lines of the house?

How do you make a charming photo of a sweet little boy and his dog creepy and unnerving? Insert a random image of a stern old man in black. Insert it upside-down. 

Was this meant to be cut apart? To be mailed as-is to some unsuspecting relative? (It is printed on the front of a postcard …) Or was it, like the photos taken with toy Holga cameras, some kind of artistic accident? At least it was a happy accident, to my eyes — but then I frequently like things for the wrong reasons, as this blog is no doubt ample evidence.

I love the photos that should have been thrown away. We don’t really have those anymore, not with a little viewing window and delete button on every camera. And yet see how much more personal they can seem? This old find bears the hand of the maker quite literally — in the shadow of a finger that drifted into the frame. And the tilting horizon line, the pen that ran out and had to be gone over in a different color, the corner that was bent and then smoothed — they’re as interesting to me as the hardscrabble landscape and the old truck in the background and Ray, who loved his dogs. Because someone obviously loved Ray.

Love hurts, the old song goes — the ego mostly. Dogs have always known this. For mysterious reasons their owners persist in signifying their devotion by forcing them into stupid hats, wrestling them into Halloween costumes or baby carriages, making them sit still for photos. They pretend they’re people, which dogs find humiliating. But being dogs, they also love love, and so they acquiesce, just for a moment.

My dog wore this exact expression last week, waiting with pained resignation in a chicken outfit in the front yard for my camera shutter to click. My toddler Tommy, in her trick-or-treat duck costume, had this same haircut, the same bangs, a little crooked. The same look of delight.

So you start out looking for old dog photos. There’s usually at least one in those big cardboard flea-market boxes full of postcards and yellowed maps and pictures of somebody’s forgotten relatives. You always take the 10 or 20 minutes to look and there it is.

The problem is, there are these other pictures waiting there too, oddities you feel fairly certain no one else will appreciate, and because they only cost 50 cents or maybe the dealer throws them in for free, you take them like a person who goes to the pound for just one puppy and comes home with a litter, afraid of what will happen if you leave even one behind. This is how you end up owning photographs of carefully posed chickens, old ladies smoking pipes, families cheerfully picnicking in gothic cemeteries. And this. What the heck is this?

Let me start by saying I found this in my favorite booth in my favorite antiques store in Muncie. (I am very likely the youngest person by at least 20 years to have a favorite Muncie antiques booth.) I had flipped past it by a few photos before it registered as something more than a rather mundane portrait. Wait, was that a face over the girl’s shoulder on the left? I flipped back, I looked more closely. Holy crap, was that four faces?

Tricks of shadow, double exposure, some old-fashioned hoax — no doubt there is a reasonable explanation. But reasonable explanations aren’t that fun, and this photo, with its strangely bemused faces melting into the foliage, into each other, is fun in a very creepy, ghosty kind of way.

Happy Halloween, and thanks for reading With Smudge in Yard. Next time I’m back to dogs, I promise.

Eileen Depriest (big loopy E and D, emphatically underlined)

Come to California and I may give you an introduction

I wonder if all you junkers and frequenters of flea markets out there share my feeling that you don’t regret the things you buy nearly as often as the things you don’t buy — in this case the album this little gem came out of and that I could have had in its entirety for I think 30 bucks. Instead I chose just this single image and let the rest go. And all these years later remember it still. 

I picked a special photo, though — that ubiquitous subject, the boy and his dog. Is it Halloween here? Or just a momentary pause in a game of Cowboys and Indians? The dog’s rope leash is still in motion and the boy on the left seems annoyed at the interruption, the interruption that preserved his little-kid scowl and his red and brown feathers and his scuffed maryjanes, if not his name.

Given just a moment of study, every discarded photo offers up its small mystery. I’m sure that’s why I like them so much — the tantalizing wisp of a story interrupted in the middle.

This one puzzles me entirely. I’m not familiar enough with military uniforms to tell for certain what country or even what era these belong to. On the back of the photo, the handwriting is almost illegible and partially crossed out, but I can make out “Blackhawk Reception, Coliseum” and the name of the group’s “mascot,” a horribly offensive racial epithet.

The ugly slur, the huddle of gray uniforms — they give this photo a strange, ominous feeling to me. And other details as well: the dirty hand of the soldier on the left, the greasy dark smears on the metal plates, and of course the white bandage on the dog’s paw.

What happened to her? What happened to them all? The worst part and the best part is there’s no way to know, not now.