Snapshots

My impressions of the world come in snapshots. People, places, even smells are all snippets of time captured in stills. It’s a never-ending roll of Kodachrome spiraling through my brain. The more snapshots I collect of a subject, the more I feel I have a complete panoramic view. I have thousands of snapshots of my husband, my best friend. Millions of my parents. I only have one of the guy at the Summerfest concert wearing an “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt when he was all alone. That made an impression on me for sure.

What if you only have one snapshot. How accurate is the moment you interpret, and does accuracy matter? Let’s say it’s this one:

Blue Prism Window House

I drive by this house frequently. I only see it from two angles: one from this direction and coming from the opposite direction, when I see the long prism window first. From this snapshot – my brief glance at this rather unappealing (in my opinion) blue house – I thought, “It looks like a dreary place to live with those tiny windows.” That was my impression.

Then one day I was caught in traffic [I seem to see the best things stuck in traffic] and happened to be stopped near the first floor’s sliver of a window. I took another snapshot:

First Floor Window

Figurines of dogs. I thought, “That’s an odd thing to have in a window so tiny.” Now I was curious about who might live in this house. I imagined the occupant as a Japanese woman, although there’s no reason it couldn’t be a man. But I decided on a woman. A woman who liked dogs, and figurines, and figurines of dogs.

The next day I purposely drove past again and stopped in front. I needed more snapshots. I needed to create a panoramic to understand this peculiar view. The car behind me honked after a few seconds. “Yeah, yeah, I’m going,” I muttered, looking back through my rearview at a disgruntled American (Japanese are slower on the horn than we are).

There were five dog figurines I think, of different breeds, all lined up facing the outside. So the Prism Window Woman didn’t favor one breed. This led to so many possibilities. Did each figurine represent a dog she had owned? Each one a memory of a dead companion? Or maybe five dogs lived there now and these were their figurine doppelgangers. Maybe she didn’t have any dogs at all. Maybe she rented the house and her landlord wouldn’t allow pets so she rebelled in this tiny way. Maybe the house was a puppy mill and anyone who knew anything about puppy mills knew the universal sign was five dog figurines in the window.

Then there’s the question of why they faced out instead of in. Facind the road, she only had dog figurine butts to look at all day, if she looked at them at all. I’d never seen anyone in the window. In fact, I’d never seen any signs of life at all in that house save the window decorations.

The smallest details in life often leave me the most perplexed. Every detail is part of a larger story, though most of the time it’s a story I’ll never know. Eventually I either file them for future use in my fiction or let them join the slurry of inseparable moments that shape me into me.

I have one final snapshot of the house with the prism windows. Here it is:

Second Floor Window

It’s very hard to see, but in the second floor window there are several large ceramic cats and a bird hanging upside down. It appears to be a peacock, or maybe a pheasant. First floor dog figurines, second floor cats and taxidermy. Clearly I had reached an impasse of understanding. I drove home and decided not to look too hard at that house anymore. I would never have enough snapshots to have a panoramic picture, and some snapshots are impossible and maybe even detrimental to interpret on their own. Once they’ve made an impression, it’s hard to change. The guy at Summerfest wearing the “I’m With Stupid” shirt made a lasting impression on me, but probably not the one he’d prefer.