Amos and the Dinosaur

And now for something whimsical and wistful. In case you can't tell, the blob to the upper left is a dinosaur, and the dinosaur is pursuing the brave boy on the brick wall who happens to be wearing a fedora and gloves. It's an exciting moment that may even involve the station wagon getting crushed. The snapshot was staged and taken by my brother Eddie on Coney Island Avenue in the late 1950s, and I'm pretty sure the boy was Eddie's good friend Amos Crowley. I like how the shadow of the arrow is pointing toward his approaching doom. (I wonder if Eddie intentionally included that little touch.) In any case, I believe Amos survived this frightening adventure, but I wonder what eventually became of him.

As you can see, my brother Eddie sort of invented trick photography. The picture is blurry in parts and double exposed, but as far as I'm concerned, it is art. It's also a kind of time capsule, because the more I look at it, the more I am drawn back into my childhood neighborhood, with all its textures and details, long-forgotten. I love the peaked roofs and bare branches and the newly white-washed Mobil garage, and even the dirty, oil-stained sidewalk. I love Amos's pose: his stance, his slant, the way he holds his arms, a little like a dance, and I love the play and the absurdity here. The world was there for our imagination and exploration, and Eddie was up for the challenge. If only he could know that nearly sixty years later this photo has been published here for anyone to see.