Chance Encounters

This weekend I've been reading my old letters and journals in order to bring to light for my son and daughter some stories from their childhood, the funny things they said and did. Just a few minutes ago, I came across this entry (which has little to do with the kind of journal entries for which I was searching), in which I recorded a chance encounter at an art museum in Columbus, Georgia, February 28, 1997:

The Photographs of Dorothea Lange
Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley, California (1938)

A dark-haired woman, probably in her forties, excitedly walks up to me as the kids and I are viewing the Dorothea Lange Photo Exhibit at the Columbus Museum. "Those men," she says, "don't they look like they come straight out of the pages of GQ? Those faces, that bone structure. No fat bellies there. Like hundreds of Gary Coopers. Where can one find men like that today?"

"Yeah," I reply, "they're hungry--It's the Depression."

A few minutes later the same woman comes up to me again in a different section of the exhibit. She wants me to look at a particular photograph, that of a woman looking out of the oval window of a black hearse-like car, from the title of the photograph, one in a funeral procession. The woman in the photograph looks pensive; her left hand partially obscures her nose and the bottom of her face. The middle-aged wrinkles around her eyes add to the pensive and sad air of the woman.

"Look at the clouds reflected in the window," points out my momentary friend. "They give the impression of eternity--all those clouds going on & on behind her. Look at how her eyes follow you. She's a spirit--in reality because she's dead by now but that moment captured forever in this photograph. She reminds us that we too will be like her."

"Even the oval frame of the car window suggests a family photograph hung on a wall," I add. "She reminds us of our own mortality."

As the woman walks out of the exhibit, she says, "I'm glad you were here for me to share my thoughts with. You've got to talk with someone when you're affected so by art."

"And I appreciate your sharing them with me," I told her. "I know the feeling."

The older we get, the more we rely on the kindness of strangers.