You don’t realize, week to week, how much junk you read. Sports articles, pharmaceutical brochures, Starbucks cups. To counter this, last weekend I hit the actual bookshelf, untouched for so many months, realizing that most of these books had not been touched since high school, college, and the years leading up to children. I took down John Berger’s About Looking, a book of essays about art, culture, poverty, socialism and zoos.

The second essay in the book is called “The Suit and the Photograph”—an analysis of the 1913 August Sander photograph Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. In this essay, Berger observes that the farmers’ provincial frames bulked inside their suits because suits, by definition, are designed for a static, sedentary physique—somehow, almost imperceptibly, the author blames capitalism. In other words, suits are not designed for bodies that dig wells and hurl hay bails into wagons; rather, they are designed for people who have two-hour lunches at Charlie Palmer’s Steakhouse next to the U.S. Capitol, which is where I was headed the next morning wearing, of course, a suit.

What happened during lunch does not necessarily pertain to the business here at hand, this thematic trajectory; however, throughout that day, I thought about Berger’s fiction and sketches, most of which I’ve never been drawn to. In the midst of his literary and artistic criticism, he’s written novels about an 18th century European womanizer, a stray dog in the Paris slums, and many sketches about the people who live in his farming community in the south of France. Again, I have never been drawn to them because they are pure, simple, incredible documents of daily life. My bad.

But, I’ve always been pushed in that direction. I will never forget my writing teachers in college telling me I had to, at least sometimes, write about my own experiences. But somehow these experiences never seemed substantial, or I wanted to keep them private, or I couldn’t remember them. Instead, I wrote stories about superheroes, lottery winners and Vietnam veterans who hear Lite Rock stations in their metal cranium plates. And that made me happy.

On this Monday, however, I decided to write something for the weekend based on a real experience, hoping I could be confronted with something that involved suits, capitalism or the stray dogs of Paris slums. I didn’t, but I came close.

After lunch, I had a long drive back to the country, where I was supposed to pick up my 8-year-old daughter after school. I was late, of course wearing a suit and talking on the phone with someone about nonsense, and when I got there, she was playing in the playground sandbox. As I approached, a little boy I had never seen before sitting on the edge of the sandbox with his feet stretched out, not touching the ground, said to me:

Boy: Hey, put my shoes on.

Me: Sorry?

[He pointed at his shoes]

Boy: Put my shoes on.

Me: Um, you need help?

Boy: Yes.

[I got on my knees, still in my suit, and reached for the shoes. He held out some socks.]

Boy: Put these on first.

[I took the socks and started to put them over his feet.]

Boy: I have sand on my feet. Dust the sand off first.

Me: Really?

Boy: Yes.

[I started to dust the sand off with a sock. Teachers now called the kids to the pickup line. Everyone was moving out. I attempted to put the sock on.]

Boy: There’s still some sand on my foot.

Me: What is your name?

Boy: [a name]

Me: Who usually does this for you?

Boy: My mom.

Me: [Looking around] Well, what about now? Who would be doing it right now?

Boy: Me.

Me: Well, maybe you should do it.

I hand the boy his sock, go over and get my 8-year-old, and we head out. On our way to the car, I look over and the boy was still sitting on the edge of the sandbox, staring at me, and I thought to myself, what just happened?

—–

B. Brandon Barker is an online media strategist with clients that include U.S. News & World Report, Time-Warner, Food Network, The Nielsen Company, Revolution Health, Entergy, Amplify Public Affairs and Dogster. His short stories have appeared in Global City Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin’s Press), Verbicide, and online at McSweeney’s. His first novel, OPERATION EMU, was the subject of a feature story in The Baltimore Sun. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, he now lives in rural Virginia.

Tagged in: about looking, august sander, charlie palmer's steakhouse, john berger