March 18, 2019:
Miniatures. Sub-wallet-size, school portraits, children I don't know.
Red hair, schoolgirl frock, kind face given to girth. Intelligent, friendly, shy.
Minute inscription on the back. Precise but spidery: name, date. It's possible to suss who she must be, but, we've never met.
My thought goes to the circumstances of the photos themselves. School portraits: certainly the adults have to have known how much we resented these? Where we were forcibly groomed by angry old biddies who hated us, who tried to erase us with combs and brushes, and with that gesture erase our rebellion.
I don't know. Maybe this lot didn't rebel. It's unclear to what extent the '60s reached El Cajon or Galt or Chinook or Clinton.
Which is where the irony of these old school photos lives. Arkies and Okies, refugees, literally displaced persons, fucked beyond measure by an economic and social system which despised them, passionately committed to "playing by the rules", I guess because they'd done, rather than smashing the rules and everything the rules protected.
What would this pretty red-haired schoolgirl in her blue schoolgirl frock think of this, with her intelligence and her friendly shy smile?