A Scenario to Consider

I’ve got a cold and am feeling a bit run down. I remarked to someone in the office earlier that I have the energy to play a game of catch with a softball, but can just barely summon the strength to do my work. It is a beautiful day here in Boston. You can walk around without a jacket on and all the vegetation is green once again. The window to my office is open and I can feel the gentlest of breezes on my back and hear the murmur of traffic seven stories below. Now, if I could only have a queen size bed with a good, firm mattress, I’d really be in business.

I ran an errand a little while ago mainly so I could do something productive. I really have stuff to do, but no one is clamoring for anything and I’m feeling tired enough to allow my feet to drag. I think for me to properly do my work right now, I have to feel my job is in jeopardy. Pathetic, right? But that’s how I feel.

I took a package of printing proofs to a client of ours a few blocks away and then mailed something at the post office. Along the way, I practiced a little “mindfulness,” taking in what my blunted senses could absorb: the smell of the air, the sounds, the people, how my body felt as it moved through space. And then I inexplicably started thinking about all the photographs I might be in. Not the ones I know about, but strangers’ photographs, possibly people visiting here from exotic countries like Nauru, Maldives, Seychelles and Idaho. How many times have I been the guy in the upper left corner picking his nose while Cousin Mustafa and his family were getting their picture taken at an old time train depot in Conway, NH? Or the tall, skinny dude crossing the street in Orlando right when Aunt Angirasa struck her pose? How many times have I been an “extra” and where are all those photos?

If I was fabulously wealthy and more than a little bored, I think it might be fun to select an obscure photo from the family album, taken, say, at a nephew’s high school graduation ten years ago, and hire a detective agency to track down everyone who might have purposely or accidentally been included in it . . . and have a reunion! Hire a fancy hall somewhere, get the image blown up the size of one of the walls and throw a dinner with a live band, maybe even a magician or two! And I’d pay everyone’s expenses — airfare, hotel, car rental, Duck Tours, the works — really make it worth their while. The only work I’d ask any of them to do would be to fill out questionnaires just get a little personal history on each one of them. Oh, and each provide a sample of their DNA and fingerprints, because I’m kooky that way.

And then, at the height of the evening, just to throw a little twist into things, I’d step up to the mike and announce something like, “I have called you all here because one of you is a murderer! That’s right, a murderer accidentally caught on film! This snapshot on the wall behind me was taken a split second before the gruesome act occurred!” Immediately the doors would be barred shut and the burly guards who before had blended so well into the scenery suddenly make their presence known. Exclamations and screams everywhere! Pandemonium! “What, is this your idea of a joke?” someone might shout. “I confess!” someone else will probably call.

Or not. Maybe we’ll just have a good time.