Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Tiny though this photo is, a small poof of the smell of time gone bye wafted up when I removed this from the plastic holder this morning. This one might fall into the category of a photo only I could love, but so be it if true. Somehow the scrappiness of the Felix, the photo and the small child all work for me here.

There is evidence that this photo was much beloved. It shows signs of having been pinned up somewhere at one time and the edges are heavily worn and reinforced by tape at the corners. If I had to guess I would say it has spent time in a wallet. There is no inscription on the back so any information about this little girl is lost. I am glad that it has come to reside in the Pictorama collection.

The little kid, holding a pint-sized Felix doll, is wearing a white smock over something slightly longer and with sleeves showing from underneath. As I look at it closely I am on the fence about if this is a boy or a girl. My original thought was definitely girl, but as I spend more time looking at it I am unconvinced. To my eye Felix looks like he wants to leap from his or her hands and charge ahead. (And yes, of course I own a Felix much like this one, as below. Mine is missing an ear sadly, but let’s remember, he is an old, old guy.)

Pams-Pictorama.com collection

The yard shown is a bit bleak. Not surprisingly the photo comes from England and this is the backyard of a typical row house there. No lovely little British garden here however, at least not in this corner of it.

As I write and consider this photo I wonder if the idea of carrying a photo in a wallet has already disappeared entirely. Cookie and Blackie as kittens grace my the front of my phone and I see them, looking like tiny aliens, every time (hundreds of times, these days even more) I pick up the phone. Perhaps that is today’s version of a photo in your wallet.

Blackie and Cookie perched on my chair shortly after arriving here in 2013.

My father carried photos of us kids, prom photos of me and my sister Loren; Edward shown as a small sprout digging around in the gravel driveway. At least those were the last incarnations I remember him having with him. (As I remember, there was a pre-cursor photo of me in second grade with long hair pulled back and a gap tooth grin – I am unsure of what the counterpart photo of Loren was, and Edward would have been an infant.)

These pictures resided tucked into a caramel colored, long, fat, leather wallet he carried for decades – not the type of wallet that had room for display as such, but I would see them flash by occasionally when he was looking for something. I took it for granted that they were there – the three of us each in our own photo, frozen in about 1980. My own wallet – also leather but black and red, is stuffed with credit and various loyalty cards, is remarkably and perhaps sadly photo-free.