With Smudge In Yard

This family photo comes from my dear friend Susie who, appropriately enough, was my photography professor in college and tried her best (though she ultimately failed) to make me understand what an aperture does. This thing is awesome for several reasons:

1. The gun. What?

2. The flag. There’s a whole group of collectors of photos with American flags in them. They’re rare. The flags, not the people. Well, probably the people too.

3. The placement of that vase makes it look like the guy in the chair is wearing a crazy hat.

4. Love the piano. I collect old photos with musical instruments in them for my brother. If you do not have a hobby, one will be assigned to you. (I also collect dead-people photos for him. I know, weird. He loves them.)

5. Oh yeah, and the dog! He looks like a rug!

That was my initial response — that and shameless hinting that she should give me the photo so I don’t have to steal it from her house next time I visit. Then, as she often did in class, Susie gently pointed out that I was missing something major, and actually the man in the chair was too — his arm.

Just wow.

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.

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.

He wouldn’t stop moving for the picture. They must have expected as much — the woman in white brought a treat to bribe him during the long exposure, ruining the symmetry of her puffed sleeves to offer it at the crucial moment. Still, in the photo, he’s a fuzzy blur of a dog, and her hand’s blurry too, a strange bit of movement in an image so carefully arranged and still.

It’s hard to tell how the people are related. Their ages, their resemblances reveal no definitive answer. But we know how they felt about their dog, front row, center. We know how the woman in black beside him, only partially containing her smile, felt.