Two Photographs

We went to the Braithwaite gallery two days ago. There is a photograph in the far left wall in the gallery, where a black woman sits on a wooden bench (which is new, unscratched, and clean enough to reflect the back of her little girl's head) with one child wrapped in a blanket in her arms, asleep or nearly, and the other, three or four years old, sitting beside her, holding a shiny, black, imitation leather purse, and looking past the lip of her bonnet at the ceiling. People without faces wander in the background. They don't see her carefully pulled-up hair, her suit jacket, her wedding ring, her pressed skirt that folded underneath her when she sat down, so now the bottom her her thighs are touching the bench, skin pressed against the same spot countless others have touched.

On the back wall of the right gallery, there sits a 15-year-old in a wedding dress, who buries her face in her hands as her mother, covered in mine soot, lights up a smoke. I stood to the side of it, transfixed by the horror I could feel from the young girl, this unwanted future with a man probably twelve years older than she looming in both our minds, and by the nonchalance of her mother, the no-nonsense way in which she's about to tell her daughter her duties for that night. Two white-haired women didn't see me, just the picture. "She's probably wondering if her mother is going to be ready in time," one says to the other with a laugh.

How can they say that? Don't they understand the girl's torment? And then I realize that they are the same generation as the mother in the photograph. They would have married off their fifteen-year-olds, too, I can tell it. My contempt for them may be unreasonable, but it makes me want to write: write for that girl in the wedding dress, what she would feel there if some part of us were the same, the part that thinks marrying our father's mining buddy would be hell, and what she would feel here in the gallery with these women laughing away the worst day of her life.

Instant Wisdom

Education only begins when you open your eyes and realize there's more to the world than you.

Money is a sugarfloss cord in holding things together.

"Don't swing your fists after the fight." = Give it up, jerk.

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I think I'll leave the proverbs to people who drink more than I do.