TINKER THE TIME TRAVELER
Or would you buy a used time machine from this woman?
The "nom d'ebay" comes from Jonathan Gash's and A&E's Lovejoy Mysteries. I wanted to use Lovejoy but some dastard beat me to it. That was probably just as well since in Scottish folk usage a "tinker" is a gypsy peddler and I'm an Appalachian Scot, a bit of a peddler and a gypsy at heart. Tinker was Lovejoy's "bird dog," hunting down antiques. In offline life I'm also a sort of bird dog, hunting down cancer cells for a group of pathologists. Obviously, I'm a visual person which may explain my fascination with stereoviews. I'm also an antique rose grower, an antique hunter, a ferret advocate, a reader of mysteries and an eater of Chinese food. Our household consists of eight cats, two ferrets, one dog, one parrot, a husband and a teenage daughter.
Stereoviews and the Time Traveler
I've come to think of stereoviews as one of the most intimate ways we have to experience the past. The stereoview I've posted below is one of my favorites. It is an 1870's view of a train wreck taken by N. C. Sanborn of Lowell, Massachusetts. There is a "ghost" in the right image. You can read the lettering on the flatcar right through him. This may be the figure of an official (note the top hat) who was there for only part of the exposure then hurried off about his business. It's obvious that everyone else in the picture was cooperating with the photographer, but not this guy. I can almost hear him grumbling, "I don't have time for this camera nonsense, I've got things to do!" I believe everyone who loves stereoviews must feel their immediacy as I do, whether it's the impatience of a figure slipping out of the frame, the Sphinx still up to its neck in the desert, the ice tracery of a Niagara winter or the strewn debris, cracked mud and smoke of the Johnstown Flood. They're our time machines to the era before newsreels.
"Ghostly Official," Train Wreck, c.1870
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