With Smudge In Yard

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.

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.

On the back of this photo, someone has written in shaky old-lady handwriting, “Walter Rockhill (black dog), Delbert Rockhill (white dog).” Rockhill is a family name, so maybe she meant Walter and Delbert were the dogs’ owners, or maybe — I hope this is true — she affectionately attached the surname, like I do with my dog, Daisy Doodle Steffen-Sparrow (she gets a middle name AND a hyphen).

Even more than the pipe, I like the paws, so tenderly touching canine shoulder and knee. I like the freckled belly and the sideways look.

Grace

Don’t Think I have

forgot you because

I don’t write but am

too busy to think about

it.

From your Big

Brother Ben.

S.w.a.k.

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.

People don’t write on the backs of their photos. They don’t now — they don’t even have photographic prints to write on the backs of now — and they didn’t then. Among the dozens and dozens of vintage and historic dog photos I have, only a small handful bear a name or year scrawled in pencil on the back.

In the face of so little information, the image itself is its best clue, and not just the people’s clothing and the background architectural details and the type of print it is, all hinting at times and places. Root around in dusty old boxes of photos long enough, and themes begin to emerge.

Dogs sitting on chairs — that’s a common pattern and one I especially like.

The photographer of this happy mutt, like the photographers of so many others, sat him on a chair first. As if to get him at his best angle, he or she brought the dog up closer to eye level, closer to the lens, closer to the viewer. There’s a tendency toward personification in the old photos, with picture-takers making dogs smoke pipes or wear hats, and there is an element of that here, but because it isn’t part of a joke, the act seems more tender. The beloved dog sits on the familiar chair, and not as part of a children’s tableau, family portrait or landscape. The frame is his, the focus his, the chair his makeshift pedestal. And it’s hard not to feel he understands, smiling as he does into the camera.

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.