a memory orphanage

On the glass cabinet across from the circulation desk at the Fletcher Free Library sits a small clear box labeled Lost & Found Photos. Inside is a short stack of snapshots -- a birthday party, three guys in a restaurant kitchen, a high school football game. Improvised bookmarks forgotten in library books. Now memories without context, strangers thrown in together. For a week or two, they did their jobs, moving from page to page, handled by warm fingers, perhaps reminisced over before taking their place between the sheets. No mere album-dwellers, they had purpose, saw action. The football game moved across white fields of type, the embarassed teen blew out her birthday candles without getting older, the guys slept in that cavernous kitchen night after night. Each had but one responsibility -- to secure a page number. Which they did flawlessly. And this was their thanks. A glass cage. Like unwanted pets. I studied the photo of a baby girl at a portrait studio and put her back. When I stopped by today, others had been added -- two dudes hamming for the camera, brothers playing in the snow. But the baby was gone. The older ones are always so much harder to place.