STOP TAKING MY PICTURE

This picture was taken when I was about five years old. This is the front yard of the home I lived in on 69^th St. in Middle Village Queens. I am making mud pies on a stone bench in front of my father’s office. I remember being a busy little rug rat. 

Our family had a florist and gardening business. We owned a quarter of a city block, where we raised the flowers which were planted on the graves in the cemetery across the street. I was a little girl who grew up in a farm in Queens where if you climbed to the top of the hill in the cemetery you could see the Empire State building.                                                                      

As a little girl I instinctively didn’t like people who were not close to me invading my space. That definitely included the intrusive and overwhelming “friends” of my family, Mudde, Rudi, and Bette. To this day I do not know what the relationship to us was. These three people would drive up in a shiny black car. The man, Rudi, was dressed in a fine suit, all black. (Even then I knew good clothes when I saw them.) In retrospect my memory of him is that he looked just like the Nazi in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. The women were thin and dressed like fashionable old ladies of the forties, long dark colored dresses, heavy stockings, conservative jewelry, hats and gloves. Mudde had gray hair and a very large ring. Bette was blonde going gray. They all smiled a bit manically. I don’t know what I would have called it when I was five, but it creeped me out.                                                           

Rudi had this big-assed camera, and from the moment he spied me, he started removing lens caps, twisting dials, and squinting through the lens. I would start heading for my most accessible hiding place on the “family farm”. I had a lot of hiding places. The neighborhood was old, the houses all had outbuildings on their properties. There was no such thing as an attached garage. We had a double garage, another garage attached to my dad’s office and an outhouse. The nearest hiding place was the dirt basement under the office. I would have preferred the office attic, but it was locked, so into the basement I went. This was an act of desperation since critters abounded here. A mouse ran across my foot, and out I went. There was Rudi, grinning and squinting.

I tried evading him by running through the yard. He followed. The adults stood in the front yard, laughing hysterically. This was before the age of adults respecting the spaces children claimed as their own. I gave up trying to hide and decided to stand my ground back at the stone bench with my mud pies.

Rudi grinned his pleasure at having me stand still, and began to shoot a series of pictures. I don’t know where the rest of these pictures are, but over the years I have seen them. This one survived because it was my father’s favorite.

I was filthy, and in my old cloths. It was breezy, and my hair kept getting in my eyes. Because my hands were muddy, I tried to blow it out of my eyes by directing a stream of breath from a curled lower lip. It was late afternoon and I was getting cold since my sun dress was wet from the mud pies.

In the series of photos there are no smiley ones of pretty little girls, just a series of exasperated poses telling this obnoxious man to leave me alone, and STOP TAKING MY PICTURE.

I felt defeated, my space invaded, and angry that an adult who wasn’t even a relative or a friend could so harass me. They all thought it was very funny I couldn’t understand why Mom and Dad didn’t come to my rescue.