Oddities

Went to sit down at the computer a moment ago, and saw something odd on the floor. Normally the odd things I see on the floor turn out to have a lot more legs than I am comfortable having in the house, but these didn’t.

It was a pair of small baby photos, maybe two inches by an inch and a half or so, of one baby. I don’t know babies from a hole in the ground–this one looks kinda…off…with very wideset eyes and a flat face, like a balding pug, but they all look like that to me, so it may just be standard baby ugliness. (I’m sure his parents thought he was cute as the dickens, of course.) He–or she, who can tell?–is wearing a pink checked jumper and laying on a pale blue comforter, and there is a blanket over him with a duck peering out from behind one elbow. I could no more tell the age of this child than I could accurately date Byzantine pottery shards, except that once upon a time I COULD date Byzantine pottery within a fairly rough range (although that information has long since vacated the mental real estate, following the trail blazed by logarithms, the complete memorization of “Paul Revere’s Ride” and all the spells in Dungeon Master. Except Fireball. I will die knowing the symbols you click to cast Fireball. When I am ancient and doddering and no longer remember my name, I will probably be trying to Fireball the nurse as she comes to change the bedpan.) Whereas I’ve never had a handle on how old a kid is until it’s old enough to try to con me into buying it cigarettes.

This is peculiar. It certainly isn’t anybody I know, and James generally isn’t in the habit of getting baby photos in the mail–and moreover, they have to have arrived there quite recently, because they were right by the wheel of the chair, and I hadn’t rolled over them, making a time frame in the last hour or two. Were I crazy, I would now begin to suspect that some nefarious group was planting baby photos in my house in an effort to drive me mad*. However, I did just pick up a copy of “Needful Things” at the used book store, and have been reading it at the desk while flying around World of Warcraft, so, using all my awesome powers of deductive reasoning, I conclude that two baby photos fell out of the back of a Stephen King novel.

That might be a little creepy–I mean, it’s not a juxtaposition one would normally think of–but I am familiar with absentmindedness, and I have used the cat as a bookmark, so I have no call to judge what anybody else uses to hold their place, and then forgets about and sells.

Well. There is no way to return them–there isn’t any writing on the back of the photos–so I suppose they now belong to that nebulous class known as “found objects” which means that I should probably be making art out of them, but more likely, will forget about in the next day and eventually throw out during a cleaning binge.

Still, it’s kind of an interesting intersection of my life with some total stranger’s, unified only in the fact that we both read this particular copy of this book once upon a time.

*The notion that they may be trying to activate my maternal urges would only make me pity them, the poor misguided bastards.

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