I have this picture framed next to my bed. For six years now it’s been framed and next to my bed. I took it when I was twelve – I was into photography then. It’s of Venice Beach in L.A. Not the commercial areas. The beach. Sand and the ocean and the hills. I have no idea why, but there was only one person on the beach besides my family and I, and the family friend showing us around. Maybe he’d taken us to a private beach. I don’t know.
Anyway. I like the picture because in the foreground there are these tracks. Three tracks, like a wheelbarrow would make. They start, real heavy and thick, at the bottom of the picture. And they sort of trail off right where the foreground turns to the background – there’s a word for that place, but I don’t know it.
One night, junior year, while studying history, I caught Becca staring at it. The picture. The tracks. They’re pitiable, she said.
Pitiable? You mean pitiful?
No, I don’t. And she went back to her book.
And I wrote, “Ours is a history of self-defined triumphs.”
Anyway. I like the picture because I don’t understand it. Either the wagon—or whatever made the tracks—started in the middle of the frame, where the tracks stop, and moved downward – in which case it’s not at all clear how the wagon got there to begin with. Or, the wagon started somewhere below and moved upward and stopped where the tracks stop – but then it’s not clear how the wagon was taken away.
People generally like the picture. They like the tracks, they say usually.
It’s not the tracks that intrigue me. It’s where the wagon’s gone.
2 comments:
a wagon and a wheel barrow are not the same thing.
i know where
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