Indy, I have been fascinated by your and the Wizard’s ongoing discussion of shadows and portals, not just in recent weeks, but over the past several years. It was with this in mind that this article fascinated me.

I was strangely drawn to these photographs.  Holes that can never be replaced, holes that forever mar the picture and cause me to wonder what was there.  Even in photographs where I can be fairly certain that nothing “important” was cut out, I am left wondering, “What if?”  or maybe more accurately, “What was?”  And then I find my mind filling in the missing pieces. 

Finally, I find myself grieving at what was lost and will never be seen.  Since you can enter into photographs, can you enter into some of these pictures and tell us what we may be missing?

Just thinking out loud.
Shane Richardson

Dear Shane,
Happy to help. I took a stroll into each of the photos and found only two where something interesting was hiding behind the missing circle that had been hole-punched out. The Native American woman in the upper photo is named Tissa and and her child is Tish-Tish. She was impregnated and abandoned by an English reporter who spent a few months in early 1935 in the little Minnesota town where she lived. Sadly, she truly loved him and the only thing (other than Tish-Tish) that he left behind was a monocle, which Tissa is wearing in her right eye in the photograph. She feels the same way about that monocle that most women feel about their wedding ring. I spent a lot of time with her because she already knew that some dogs can talk, and I don’t run across that very often. I tell myself the Englishman later returned to Tissa and that they lived happily ever after.

The photo of the baseball player was hole-punched because a young hawk had pounced on a garden snake in the background and the skinny snake was fighting for its life. I ran toward the hawk, barking as I went, so it flew off and left the little snake behind. This creates an interesting paradox. Did I change history by altering an outcome? If so, there is no longer a young hawk hidden behind the hole-punch. So why don’t we see him flying away? And why am I not in the photo, running toward the hole punch?

Just thinking out loud,
Indy Beagle