I miss their breed. Not ten years ago, one could still find them in parks and church patios, to which a visit would not end without a family photograph taken with their Canon or Minolta. In the yard, they would just sit on the bench beside a restless sparrow and wait for that moment – all the while their eyes escorting father, mother and children as they entered the church, lighted candles and prayed before the altar – and when the family came out of the door, they would spring to their feet (scaring the sparrow) to offer their services.
These itinerant photographers – camera slung around the neck like a noose – became a fast dying breed when technology sneaked the camera phone into our hands and urged us to take a selfie. Truth to tell, the dying began earlier with the Instamatic, and later with the digital camera went on to reach its logical conclusion.
I used to engage the services of one for them. Once, when we needed a photographer to document a group activity, a friend introduced him to us. He seemed a favorite of women’s clubs – with reason, because, in the time of no photoshop, he took flattering shots. I found him obliging and well-disposed, no matter if reticent. In my opinion, as a photographer, he would score a perfect ten, except for one thing – he stuttered. He could not say five words without repeating the first four, the unrepeated fifth being the fruit of determined effort.
Because of discreet inquiry (or indiscreet gossip), I came to know the reason why he fumbled for words – the death of his wife. Her loss destroyed his speech, which for him owed its support to her presence.
Years ago, I invited him to a Christmas party in the office – after the caterer such an occasion would call for a photographer – we needed to keep the food’s freshness on the table as well as in our memory.
During the usual singing after the eating, our man presented himself, an unusual thing for someone who could not speak straight. Considering his stutter, I expected him to render the song he chose with a built-in echo. But when he began singing, our sniggers stopped – he sang with grace, enunciating each word with a Shakespearean actor’s purity of tongue. We heard a different man before us, perhaps the real one, the man who existed before his grief.
He stepped forward to sing because he knew he could; he chose not to suppress the gift that God had given him, or bury it in the ground, as did the servant who was entrusted by his master with one talent – a unit for measuring the weight of gold or silver.
In the parable that Jesus told, and which Matthew writes about in his Gospel, before he went on a journey, a man gave five talents to one servant, two to another and one to a third. The first two traded with their talents and made money, but the last hid his lone talent in the ground, roguishly explaining to the master upon his return, “Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.” And so, to make a long story short, for him condemnation and his colleagues commendation, from their master.
This is what talent – God’s gift – does to a person, it provides him with an escape route out of adversity. In our man’s case, song opened his mouth. Indeed, even inanimate things find their voice when given the light of beauty.
When the wife and I visited the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and viewed the great rose window in the north transept, I recalled an anecdote about the nineteenth-century French architectural restorer, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. His mother had taken him as a child to the cathedral. When he saw the rose window, he exclaimed, “Maman, ecoute, cést le rosacea qui chante!” (Listen, mama, it is the rose that is singing.)
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