Best Two-Word Poem In the English Language?
Rearview Mirror
I've Always Wondered What Happened To Those Photos
Years ago I had this friend who lived with his grandfather in Old Town, Maine. The grandfather was an eccentric minister at an old church in town. My friend Andy was a fetal alcohol syndrome kid and a first rate hell raiser, but his grandfather, Eldon, was something of an intellectual, and his house was full of books and interesting things. Eldon was one of those funny, distracted characters of the sort you'll generally find hanging around any university. I loved going over there and poking around in his stuff and trying to shoot the shit with him. He had this one room --his study, I guess-- that was unbelievable; to this day I've never seen anything like it. He collected photos of burning churches, and there must have been at least fifty of them framed on the walls of his study. It was the only room in the house that had any semblance of order, or at least the clutter was neatly built up around the carefully arranged photos of the burning churches. Every time I'd go over there I'd ask to see those photos. At the time I remember asking Andy what the deal was, and he had characteristically shrugged and answered, "He likes them, I guess."
A number of years later, after Andy had moved away, I stopped by one time when I was in town, just to say hello to Eldon, but also because I'd never been able to get those photos out of my head. I finally just came right out and asked him about the story behind the collection.
"It's been a hobby for many, many years," he said. He had started collecting the things purely by accident, when one day he found an old photograph of a local church fire at a library sale. He'd felt oddly compelled to buy it and hang it in his den. There was something so dramatic and beautiful about it, he said, the chiaroscuro of the dramatic lighting, the flat blacks, grays, and silvers, the blur of the firefighters in the foreground, the soft blush of the smoke and flames rising up toward the eerily-lit steeple, and beyond it all a deep and seemingly limitless darkness. Once he'd had the photo on his wall he'd found himself drawn to it, puzzling over its attraction. He went back to the library and did some digging around in the newspaper archives, and discovered that the cause of the fire had been lightning. His older brother had been an insurance adjustor in Portland at one time, and Eldon had always found his brother's use of the phrase "Act of God" to describe certain insurance calamities for which no human culpability could be assigned both curious and moderately distasteful. Why, Eldon wondered, would God allow a place of worship to burn? He assumed that church fires must be a relatively common occurrence, and he started poking around in the photo archives of local newspapers, libraries, and historical societies. He discovered that virtually every little town in the area had had a church burn somewhere in its past, and just casually poking around Old Town he managed to find a number of other striking images. One thing led to another, he said, as it always seemed to, and before long he was taking day trips, and then vacations, in search of photos of burning churches. He made his way up and down the East Coast and into the South. Eventually Eldon had even traveled to Europe, ostensibly for a military reunion, but he'd spent much of his time poking around in French towns looking for more photos. They'd had some whoppers over there, he said, some tremendous church fires which were so far in the past that he was retrieving history rather than photographs. By this time he had accumulated an extensive history of church fires; he had a shelf full of black-spined journals from his travels, with each of his discoveries documented with as much detail as he'd been able to uncover. Besides his own handwritten accounts, the pages of these journals were stuffed with newspaper clippings and copies of pages from ancient books and local histories. He had a file cabinet full of photos and copies of photos of many different sizes, as well as a large collection of photo postcards of burning churches.
It was, of course, a remarkably obsessive collection, grown by this time well beyond Eldon's ability to offer any kind of a truly reasonable explanation for its existence. He admitted to me that I was the first person who had ever really taken an interest in what he called his "little hobby." He seemed genuinely perplexed by the extent to which the pursuit of these photos had consumed him, almost as if this fact had never really struck him until he sat down and recounted the history of his collection to a relative stranger.
I've been haunted for years by the thought of what might have happened to Eldon's photos and journals after his death. I know that he spent the last several years of his life in a nursing home, and his old house was uninhabited until he died, after which it was put on the market and sold. I lost track of his grandson Andy over the years, and at some point I tried to track him down, but had no luck. The last time I was in Maine I made a trek to Old Town and asked around about the collection at Eldon's old church, the local historical society, and various antique stores in the area. Nobody seemed to have the foggiest notion what I was talking about. Sure, they all remembered Eldon, certainly, but this collection I was asking about? That was news to them. I never did find out what happened to those photos, and it breaks my heart to think that they might have ended up in a dumpster.
4:26:28 PM 
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