With Smudge In Yard

I imagine a mom taking this photo — an exasperated mom who goes to all the trouble of dressing her boy in a cleaned and ironed white sailor suit (immediately wrinkled again) and pulls a wet comb through his hair (the marks are still visible in his bowl cut) and then despairs when neither boy nor dog will hold still in the hot sun and ALL SHE WANTS IS JUST ONE GOOD PHOTO. The boy’s expression, his stranglehold on his new puppy say it all. Sitting for mom photographs is an exquisite kind of kid torture, and that sailor suit is being ripped off and thrown under the bed the minute the camera clicks.

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.

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.

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.

It wasn’t enough to pay a dollar and rescue this photo from a box of damp ephemera overlooked in the grass at a Kentucky antiques fair. It’s slowly being betrayed by its own chemical process, growing fainter and fainter, soon to fade away entirely.

Until then, the faces of the children turn whiter and more ghost-like, despite the boy’s smile. And like the best salvaged photos, in addition to the curiosities of costume and hairstyle, this one offers a little mystery: the X someone has drawn in pencil under the father’s feet.

I’m guessing dogs were photographed so often with children in the old days because they were thought to belong to the children, and not because they were thought to be one of the children (which is why I have so many photos of my dog Daisy and my daughter Tommy together). Still, there is a brotherly feeling to this trio with their Huck Finn hats and serious expressions, like they might be contemplating some adventure beginning after the shutter clicks.

Long before Paris Hilton, dogs were accessories for coddled children. Or maybe children were accessories for gigantic dogs — it’s hard to tell in this family photo that hung in my mother-in-law’s house and started my collection. The younger boy looks a lot like one of my nieces when she was little, making me wonder about all those distant and unknown ancestors who might have carried our eye color or set of the mouth or way of laughing. Or love of dogs.

The little boy (I think it’s a boy!) wears a little girl’s dress and spit curls right out of “The Little Rascals” and one of those inscrutable expressions toddlers always wear. Eyebrows knitting, one hand gripping his antique stroller, he studies the camera. The camera studies him.

But in the background, unexpected, blurry, some maybe-beagle stands, legs splayed like he just came racing cartoonishly around the corner of the house. His tongue lolls out in a big canine smile.

I love these photos in which the presence of the dog is an accident, his unnoticed intrusion into the photographer’s arrangement the thing that makes the image live all these years later.