The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

The first roll

I had her sit on the stone steps, about halfway up, where the sun came across the square and lit her from the side.

Then I got down on the sidewalk. I crouched low, the way I used to for ballgames, so the camera was looking up at her a little. My knees told me about it right away.

I had on my flat cap and the brown cardigan over a plaid flannel shirt. My wife knitted me that cardigan the winter before she passed. I have worn it every cool morning since. It has a patch on one elbow now.

“Grandpa,” Tamsin said, “people are watching.”

There were a few. A couple walking a dog. A man sweeping the walk in front of the hardware store. Two older ladies coming out of the café on the corner with coffee in paper cups.

“Let them watch,” I said. “Look at me, not at them.”

She tried. She did. But she sat on those steps as stiff as a fence post, with her hands folded on her knees and a smile that did not get anywhere near her eyes.

I shot the first roll anyway. You always shoot the first roll anyway. It loosens the both of you up, and every so often there is something in there you did not expect.

Thirty-six frames. I wound it back and opened the camera and dropped the roll in my cardigan pocket and loaded the next one, and Tamsin watched me do it.

“I’ve never seen anybody do that,” she said. “Put film in.”

“Well,” I said, “now you have.”

The laugh

On the second roll, I started talking to her. That is the real trick of it, and it always was. You do not take a picture of a person. You take a picture of what happens to their face when they forget about you.

“Did your mother ever tell you about the fountain at the county fair?” I asked.

Tamsin shook her head.

“She was about your age,” I said, still shooting. “Wearing that same jacket. She was walking along the edge of the fountain by the 4-H barn with a corn dog in one hand and a lemonade in the other, showing off for some boy.”

“Oh no,” Tamsin said.

“Oh yes. She stepped back to wave at him, and she went in backwards. All the way in. Corn dog and all.”

Tamsin put her hand over her mouth.

“And when she came up,” I said, “the first thing she did was hold up that lemonade to show everybody she hadn’t spilled it.”

That did it.

She laughed. Not a picture smile. A real laugh, with her whole face open and her long brown wavy hair coming loose everywhere, and her shoulders going up inside that big faded jacket.

I got it. I knew I got it the second the shutter fell. After thirty-five years you know.

I shot the rest of that roll as fast as I could wind it, and she kept laughing, because now she was laughing at me, an old man in a flat cap down on the sidewalk on his bad knees.

Three hundred frames

After that she was easy. She forgot about the people on the square. She forgot about the camera. She just talked to me.

She told me about the drive-in, about the man who comes every night at six for a cherry limeade and tips her a dollar in quarters. She told me about her best friend from band, whose dad had been laid off since June.

She told me about the vet tech program, how you do two years at the community college and then you can work at a clinic, and how there is a big animal vet out toward Slater who said she could ride along next summer.

I moved her around the square as the light changed. I put her under the maples with the leaves coming down. I put her at the old cannon on the lawn, sitting on the wheel.

I put her back on the steps when the sun got higher, sitting sideways with her knees up and her chin on her arm, looking off across the square like she was waiting for somebody.

About eleven, the bell on the church a block over rang the hour, and she turned her head to look at it, and I got that too.

By noon I had shot eight full rolls and most of a ninth. Three hundred frames, give or take. My knees were done, and my right hand was cramping from winding.

“Is that a lot?” Tamsin asked, when I finally stood up.

“For one girl on one morning?” I said. “That’s more than I shot of the governor when he came through in 1988.”

She laughed again and helped me up off the sidewalk, and then she hugged me, right there on the courthouse lawn in front of the two ladies with their coffee.

“Thank you, Grandpa,” she said into my shoulder. “Even if none of them come out.”

“They’ll come out,” I said.