Great-great-granddad

My great-great-grandfather, by all accounts, didn’t put much stock in photographs.  Too new, too strange.  It was almost indecent, making pictures of people like that.  He’d heard that kings and princes and such had painters to come and make pictures of them, but that was painting, that was different.  It took a while… several days, by his reckoning… and, well, that was for kings.  Like wearing those bright-colored tights — fine for fine folk, but not for him.  These photographs, somehow, were worse.  Too quick.  They didn’t take so long to make, and so people were going around wasting them on regular folks.  That just couldn’t be right, could it?

He didn’t hold with fairs and festivals and the like, either.  Too much like carnival.  Oh, yes, he’d heard stories about carnival.  A visiting preacher had spoken one Sunday morning about the immoral ways of the old country and how every year they had revelry so scandalous that it took forty days to atone for it afterward.

But… well, the cantaloupes had done so well this year, and he couldn’t have eaten them all before they went to rot.  Wastefulness was sinful, so he’d better find someone who could put them to use.  Best place to do that is the fair… and then people got to talking about how large and tasty-looking the cantaloupes were, and the next thing you know, they’d sort of taken him by the elbow and shooed him over to a table where he could set down his cantaloupes and let Mister Somebody-or-other in what looked like a city-bought suit — at least $25, his cousin had said — poke them and thump them and make “aha, mm-hmm” sounds under his breath.

And then they handed him a piece of bright blue ribbon, smiling and clapping him on the back and shaking his hand.  He shoved the ribbon into the back of his belt; perhaps the wife could use it on the new dress she was sewing.

A photographer appeared, tripod over his shoulder.  The small man hustled my twice-great-grandfather over away from the crowd; his young assistant practically shoved the cantaloupes into his arms.  “Hold that,” the photographer called, spreading the legs of his tripod and ducking under the cloth cover.

Well… they were all so determined, and friendly, and it had been a memorable day, and perhaps the grandchildren might want to remember what their grandfather looked like… but he didn’t have to enjoy all the attention.  No, sir.  No need for enjoyment of it, not at all.

They were fine cantaloupes this year, though.

Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride — pride at his own humility — will appear. — C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters