April 17, 2006
Portrait of a Funny Old Man
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Gary, Hull, England, 1934
My father tells a good story about when he was a boy in England. I
thought I would share it. He and his parents were temporarily living in
a third-floor apartment waiting for a house to be built. Each day, he
came home from school and ran up the stairs to the front door past a
portrait of a funny little old man. On the day that the family could
finally move out of the cramped apartment, my dad was puzzled why his
parents had removed everything from the apartment except for the
portrait of the funny old man that always lay propped up against the
wall just outside the front door. When he asked, "What about the
portrait of that funny old man -- are we leaving it here?" his parents
looked startled and said, "You mean the empty old picture frame propped
up by the wall?"
He swears that that empty picture frame always had a man's face in it
when he passed it by.
