In Pictures

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Old photographs are haunting.  One thing I’ve long noticed about high school pictures from the early twentieth century is that those kids look much more grown up than today’s graduating seniors.   (Or even my graduating class, for that matter.)  We’ve extended childhood since then, now stretching it into young professional stage.  Who doesn’t want to be forever young?  It seems to me that those who spend time in bookstores know about the Images of America series of books.  These record what local historical societies collect and put them out there for public consumption.  Some day I’ll get them for all the towns I’ve called home.  For now, however, I wanted a peek at the early days of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.  If you’re by chance not familiar with the series, these books have captions and brief introductions to chapters so there’s context to explain it all. But the pictures are the draw.

One of the other features I noticed was that in a number of group photographs, a person or two is often listed as “unknown.”  It’s a fair bet that the other people in those antique images knew who these forgotten individuals were.  Photography, however, doesn’t really help those born before the mid-nineteenth century.  The photograph has a mysterious power.  It preserves a moment in history and as soon as the shutter clicks we’ve already become an older person.  In my work I have to locate people and I do so on university websites.  I’ve discovered that most faculty are far older than their pictures suggest.  Who has time to update the incremental changes every year?  Before you know it, your hair’s gone gray and you’re struggling to keep the pounds off.  We look at our younger selves and wonder.

At least I do.  I see pictures of a younger me and wonder what he might’ve done differently if he could see a picture of a present-day me.  One thing he would appreciate is my beard, such as it is.  Neither father nor step-father wore a beard, but young me always wanted one.  As life would have it, I couldn’t manage a passable one until after seminary while guys I knew in high school had heavy beards even then.  But this is a small thing.  The real changes take place in our heads.  Each day, each second, is a learning opportunity.  That’s perhaps the reason I like books like this.  Photographs of a place of fascination, even though I know none of the people or their families, are a real draw.  And they’re a form of haunting.

Scared Space

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It was dark.  I often work in dim light since the computer screen backlights everything.  I’d strained my back the day before, and getting into a standing position took some time, with the first steps being necessarily ginger.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it in the shadows.  A wolf spider was on the arm of my chair, just inches away.  I could move neither fast nor fast enough.  By the time I’d hobbled to an empty peanut butter jar (we keep them for this purpose), it was gone.  But the fright remained.  It was several hours until I could think of sitting in that chair again, although the spider was last seen fleeing the site of the attack.  That got me to thinking about how spaces maintain the events that transpire in them.  It’s the early stage of haunting, I suppose.

Spiders were a childhood terror.  Just a week before the current spider incident, I was in the basement doing some repairs when a spricket jumped on my arm.  Sprickets, also known as camel crickets or cave crickets, live in damp places and they actually jump at their perceived enemies to frighten them away.  It works.  I was absolutely terrified by the thing.  It was large, and although it was on my arm only a second or two, I wanted to run screaming from the cellar and strip off my shirt and throw it in the washer.  I couldn’t go back into the basement the entire day.  It was the site of the fright, you see.  Spricket and spider were long gone, but their threat remained in the place I’d encountered them.

I often write about sacred space.  There is also such a thing as scared space.  I can see how this would’ve evolved from our primate ancestors.  Chimpanzees, for example, are frightened of large spiders.  They can climb trees right after you and they are impossibly fast.  I suspect in our encounter the spider was more frightened of me than I was of it.  I’m a giant in its multiple eyes and, were I not a believer in catch-and-release, could easily have killed it.  (Messy for the chair, but conceivable.)  Our ancient ancestors would likely remember—this is the place the spider bit Oog.  Must avoid.  So the idea remains, scarring the spaces we habitually sit.  Spiders outdoors, as long as I see them before they see me, are not such a source of fear.  But right now I think I’ll pick a new favorite chair, until my favorite becomes sacred again.