Pesky Reflections

We went down to our storage locker this afternoon to take pictures of my father’s artwork. He has been nominated for a Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider award in North Dakota and I’d been asked for whatever material I could provide in support of his eligibility. I was going to go in my running clothes but when we stepped outside and discovered how bitter cold it was I went back in and changed back into my street clothes. The locker is in a three-story building several miles from our home. R got out and opened the door to the loading dock which raised slowly on its chains as I backed in. It was dark inside the spacious entry and I could barely see. I backed up slowly but still managed to hit the loading dock bumper hard. I got out and checked for damage and didn’t see any from the loading dock but there was a heavy set of scratches on the right side of our car bumper. I’m guessing someone scraped it as they entered into an angled and narrow parking slot at Safeway. I shifted my attention back to the more pertinent project at hand, which did not go as easily I’d imagined. We had a hell of a time taking pictures of my dad’s illustrations. They’re all framed under a highly reflective glass. Every shot R took with her smartphone contained reflections of the ceiling or the walls or our arms and faces. We took one of the space illustrations out to the loading dock area for the dimmer light. We positioned it on a flatbed gurney and I held my jacket over it while R looked for a good shot. Meanwhile, a middle-aged woman backed in, got out, and asked if we were using the other gurney. No, we’re not, I said, as I went back to concentrating on our photo problems. I was absorbed in shading the picture when a loud crash startled me. The woman stood next to me – smiling like a lunatic - after she threw her items hard on the gurney, rolled it around and briskly exited. I refocused. We got a fairly decent picture and went back to do the others. Same problems with the overheard lights. We went back out to the loading dock. This time a silver-grey SUV had backed in and three twenty-something men got out and grunted something about the gurney and I shouted back, no, it’s free, we weren’t using it. They seemed sub-verbal. After they retrieved their items from storage one of the young men got in and started the car. Oh good, I muttered, we all get to die from carbon monoxide poisoning. One of the other men got around to opening the garage door and they left, hip-hop thudding hard from a woofer. We gave up on the third illustration – a space shuttle docking with a space station and the legend Museum of Flight at the bottom – and brought it home, where we went through all the same problems. Wherever we put the picture or angled it or held it or dimmed the lights our blinds or our faces or our furniture would obscure the illustration. We finally settled for the best, which was clear, save for R’s outstretched arm. The snow laden hills of the Turtle Mountains my father had rendered in watercolor was the easiest. It hangs in our bedroom, where the lighting is easiest to modulate. I like this watercolor very much, it’s serene and gentle and the fading light at the top of a copse of bare-limbed trees lining the ridge of two soft hills green and gold and streaked with variations of mist and cloud.