my brother | WEGGIEBOY'S BLOG by Doug Thomas

Take a look at these photos, taken sometime toward the middle of the 1940s, during WWII.

The place: My maternal grandmother’s front yard. The family lived in the second story apartment there until completing a house on Mississippi in 1951. The little boy is my older brother, wearing as spiffy an ensemble as I’ve ever seen him in! My brother is a Levis and Nebraska Huskers t-shirt kind of guy now, and he wears a baseball cap. My guess is it’s springtime, and my brother is playing with a Christmas wheelbarrow. I need to ask…!

“Shadow man” is my father, wearing a civilian hat, so I guess this was a Sunday. My Dad was Chief of Police in this town, and most photos of him then show him in uniform. The town had a major air base training people for the glider and parachute aspects of the D Day invasion. My Dad worked very hard then because he had a small staff meant for a smaller town and thousands of soldiers with not much to do after training but come into town. Many married the mothers of my friends growing up. No coincidence!

Anyway, this is a favorite photo of Dad because it shows him relaxed, off duty, and doing what fathers do: taking photos of their little guys at play. And…accidentally getting themselves in the photo, if as a shadow. Or maybe it was on purpose. Dad’s gone — he died on election day 2008 — but he was a very purposeful, methodical man. There is a suggestion of a composed shot here.

=(!)=

Then, there is this second shot in the sequence, a more spontaneous yet more mysterious image. Same setting. Same brother. Same father taking a photo as a shadow man.

There’s a change in angle, though, one brought about by my brother’s burst to go to Dad. Dad takes another shot, capturing something I’d never noticed in this photo before: a third person standing by the locust tree, both shadows on the left, while the photo’s taken.

It appears to be a male. Or is it? Who might it be, this new “shadow man”? Yet, he appears higher in the photo than he should were he just standing by the tree. Was he actually a child, a child standing on the bird bath by that tree? If a child, did Dad know he was standing on the birdbath? I don’t think that was generally allowed…! We’ll never know.

It takes time to get usable photos and videos for this blog. Mostly, I have issues with low light, dark cats, and a camera that’s not designed for adequate coverage of the first two. There’s just so much you can do with Photoshop and editing. Never mind, I have no shame and will post whatever I have to feed the demand for more cats on the Internet!

This first photo came from a video of Dougy hopping on the table (“Bad kitty!”) after my brother and I finished breakfast and were enjoying the digestive process. It’s a retired guy thing! Anyway, the video includes my brother saying a naughty word (“@$$hole”) and me saying something back about how I was making a video and he said “@$$hole” on it. Two negatives don’t make a positive, eh?! My blog’s rated “G” so anyone can read it, if they have to.

It’s a pretty good photo of both my brother (he’s on the right…) and my cat Dougy (the fuzzy one…). For further identification purposes, Dougy’s the one on the table since my brother knows better and is a great house guest!

Then there is this:

After a session of “cat toy that looks like a hairy bird on a string” (or “mouse that looks like a bird” — the boys aren’t that fussy), Andy (in front) and Dougy (the other cat) are pooped. Notice how they manage to sleep right in the way. It’s a cat code business that anyone with a cat (or dog) knows is a requirement they must follow if they are to keep in good with the cat union.

Inevitably, Dougy gets bored blocking the front door, wakes up, and heads out to other cat adventures.

Of course, while Dougy’s off to other cat adventures, Andy holds down the cardboard fort, which, conveniently, allows him to block the main passage to the kitchen in case someone decides to “feed the kitties”. Of course, the kitties were fed earlier, so the next official feeding time is after we get back from the military museum this afternoon.

For anyone still with me, here’s what the boys were doing in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a bit dicey because black cats + low light + camera that handles low light “sort of” =’s one of those videos from Hell that you show family and friends when they stay too late on a work night visit! Here we go: