Mama in a Cup

Infallible Rule #1 of kids with cameras seems to be this: If you give a kid a camera, you will get in return a series of photos of the most insignificant things ever.

I remember when I got my first childhood camera, a Brownie Hawkeye that shot black and white pictures from rolls of film loaded into a plastic box that seems huge compared to modern-day cameras. Excitedly, I would balance the box about waist-high, look down into the lens, and click the button that was sure to afford a ton of laughs for Joe down at the drugstore, where I would take the film to have it developed for pickup a few days later.

A kid with a new toy, literally, I snapped pictures of the fire hydrant on the corner, ants on our brick sidewalk, and the feet of the old lady next door. When Mom scolded me for "wasting film," I focused my photographic energies on my baby brother. This is why we have a hundred or so pictures of him either sleeping or crying, which was pretty much all he did there for a while.

So no one was really surprised to see what happened over Christmas when Bootsie's Uncle Teebo turned her loose with the camera on his cell phone. She took a picture of every page in a Berenstain Bears storybook, along with a shot of nearly every piece of furniture in my house. And then, among all those, there was this true masterpiece:

Now you may think this is just a mundane picture of a plastic cup on the end of table where Bootsie sat as her adult relatives played cards. But the precise angle at which she held the camera caught the head and shoulders of her mama, sitting on the other side of the table, in a very unusual relationship to the cup. If you look at it just right, daughter Cookie appears to be bobbing out of the top of a green cup.

I can't adequately describe the decibel level or the duration of the laughter pouring out from me and five kids as we encountered this classic shot while scrolling through Bootsie's camerawork. "Look," I said to Bootsie with my eyes and nose running and my stomach aching from a paroxysm of uncontrollable laughing. "It looks like your mama is in a cup!"

The card game was suspended as players abandoned it one by one to come upstairs and investigate the source of the whoops, hoots, and giggles. With each new viewer, the rest of us erupted again, as though seeing the picture for the first time. If laughing is really as healthy for people as experts claim, then our family should be in good shape for 2017.

We have named this piece of art Mama in a Cup. As for Bootsie, Mr. Whistler had nothing on this girl, who, at the ripe old age of six, is already showing a keenly artistic eye.

In about twenty years, you might want to keep an eye out for new talent bursting on the contemporary museum scene. Bootsie's artwork with crayons, colored pencils, and markers has always been impressive, but now that she has had a taste of success with photography, there may be no stopping her.

I am tempted to go back and see what the magic of Photo Shop can do for one of my old fire hydrants. But no matter how hard I try, I don't think I could achieve anything as artfully perfect as Mama in a Cup.