“Accidental Magritte”
Mothershead Neck, Virginia
Summer 1984, Winter 2009, Winter 2016 (c) Stu Jenks
(From my e-book The Transpersonal Papers.)
I found this image in a scrapbook from the 1980’s. I modified the daylights out of it, cropped it, converted it from color to black and white, pushing the contrast hard, cleaned up the dust. It was with other images taken at The River from that time, most of them pretty mundane: people thickly smiling while sitting around a dining room table; benign images of the Rappahannock River at sunset that had no pop to them at all; a rather dull shot of a tree. But this image was like a Magritte painting; very surreal, with an odd universality to it. It's like it's a still taken by a unit photographer on a movie set.
Who is the Man in the Suit? Is he a banker, come to tell the Crab Man he had foreclosed on his farm? But the Crab Man seems to be smiling. Is he happy to see to Man in the Suit? Or is it just a nervous grin?
But I know these men. And I know some of their stories. The Man in the Suit is Buck Flintom, one of my deceased father’s best friends. And the Crab Man is my dad, Stuart. The image was taken at Ed-Lil, the ancestral summer place of the Jenks clan on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, and my best guess is it was taken in 1984, for it was in the same scrapbook that also contained images of my wedding to Denise, that same year. But why is Buck wearing a suit? I suppose it’s because Buck, who was probably still working for IBM in 1984, had most likely driven the three hours to Ed-Lil, straight from work on a Friday afternoon, to spend the weekend with Stuart.
And the photographer? That’s an even bigger mystery. I would have said it was Buck’s wife, Margaret, but wouldn’t he have taken off the three-piece suit, if he had gone home to pick her up? My best guess is it was my mother, Mary Jenks, who took the shot, and that, my friends, is quite shocking. Mary may be one of the worst photographers ever to walk the face of the Earth, always cutting off heads, never holding the camera straight or steady, forever sticking her fingers over the lens of cameras. But you know what they say. A stopped clock is right, twice a day. And Mary was right on the money that afternoon.
Sad. Mary is now anxious, old and dying of dementia, and Dad is long dead, but Margaret and Buck are doing all right from what I hear, still living on their farm outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Life goes on, until it doesn’t.
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