This photograph is interesting to me not because the child is beautiful (though she certainly is) nor because—in the low light of the room—her skin glowed like porcelain (though it did), nor even because by happy accident her position against the curtains created the illusion of a pre-Raphaelite fireside scene (are there any of those? well, there is one now). This photograph is interesting to me because of what you cannot see (but I did). Sixteen great-grandchildren of the Whitehead line were encouraged, cajoled, herded and laughingly chased onto a sofa for a group picture the other night. (I’ll post a sample picture of this scene in the comments. You’ll know my subject by the fact that she’s the only one looking away from the cameras, focused instead on the baby she’s holding. There were, for the record, at least nine “greats” missing from this picture.) One baby’d bumped her nose and was crying. A toddler beamed and searched for the camera that was pointed at him. Children laughed and jostled and stared at each other. Ranged around the room in near-full-circle were mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, second cousins, grandparents and one beautiful great-grandmother, almost all of whom were pointing phones, cameras, directorial fingers and calling out variations of “look at us, please!” And while all this cheerful, very-loud din was going on, I looked over at the end of the couch, and there was B---, and she was in the crowd but, at that moment, she was not of the crowd. I showed the photo in-camera to Ron and joked, “I finally found an introvert in the Whitehead clan,” and then he said, “It’s not introversion, really,” and he looked at me and solemnly tapped his own chest and I nodded and tapped my own chest and we both understood what I’d captured. Self-possessed, inward-turning, able to drift away from the crowd on the wings of imagination. The dreamer, the visionary, the artist has a certain look, even as a child. We come into this world with a beautiful odd something. We work our whole lives to learn it and channel it and (sometimes) damp it down so we can sit on couches with other folks and be happy. Some of us are encouraged by people who love us and it flowers easily into music and poems and stories and paintings and…. Some of us are discouraged by people who love us and we find ourselves doing dishes at age 50 and staring out the window over the kitchen sink and feeling like something’s missing from our lives and… Some of us can’t cope with it; we feel too different from everyone else, the self-harm follows and… Some of us are lucky enough to be born at the right time, in the right place, in the right family…and everything is possible. “It is interesting that we call something good a “dream,” but being called a “dreamer” is somewhat of a putdown. Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world. If you are a secret dreamer, it’s your time to announce yourself.” ― Vera Nazarian