The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

The porch

Tamsin came over to my place that Sunday after church. She does that most Sundays. I live alone on the east side of Marshall since my wife passed, and she knows I like the company more than I let on.

We sat on the porch in the two metal chairs. The morning was still warm then, the last warm one, though the wind had a different smell to it, like it was thinking about fall.

“Grandpa,” she said, “please don’t tell Mom about the pictures.”

“Why not? Your mother would want to know.”

“That’s why.” She pulled her knees up in the chair. “She’d pay it. She’d take it out of the light bill money and go short, and then she’d pick up an extra shift to cover it. She’s already on nights.”

I knew she was right. My daughter Lacey is 41 years old and works nights at the same plant, and she has never once in her life told her girl no when there was any way at all to say yes.

“And don’t you pay it either,” Tamsin said, and she looked right at me. “I mean it. Kirby would know where the money came from. He’d hold it over Mom for a year. He’d say we went behind his back.”

I opened my mouth, and then I closed it again, because that was exactly what I had been about to offer.

“It’s just pictures,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

She said it the way you say a thing you have been telling yourself all night.

What I used to do

I worked for the county weekly for thirty-five years. I started when I was twenty-four and quit when they went to everybody shooting on their phones, and I did not fit anymore.

I shot ballgames on Friday nights, both teams, home and away. I shot barn fires and wrecks on the highway and the flood of ’93, standing up to my knees in the river bottoms with my camera over my head.

I shot fair queens and 4-H steers and every ribbon cutting in three counties. I shot Little League, and later I shot those same boys’ weddings, and later still I shot some of their funerals.

I still have the Nikon. It is an old Nikon F, a film camera with a silver chrome body, brassed through along the edges where it rode on my hip for thirty years. It still works as well as the day I bought it.

I still have the darkroom in my basement, too. My wife used to say the house smelled like fixer from October to March, and she was not wrong.

And in the door of my refrigerator, next to the ketchup, I had nine rolls of Kodak Tri-X I had been saving for no reason I could have named.

Sitting on that porch, looking at my granddaughter pretending it did not matter, I knew what the reason was.

“Tamsin,” I said, “are you working Saturday morning?”

“I go in at two. Why?”

“Meet me on the courthouse square at nine,” I said. “Wear something that’s yours. Something you like. Not something a studio told you to wear.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she looked at the old camera bag hanging on its nail just inside the screen door, where it has hung since I retired.

“Grandpa,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t,” I said. “I want to. It’s been a long time since I had anybody worth shooting.”