Lula Wheeler

Pictures can lie in both directions: They can make us look better than we do and worse than we do, and the truth dwells somewhere in-between.

We do not actually look as godawful as we think we look in those snapshots that make us cringe. Nor do we look quite as appealing as we think we look in the shots we'd happily display, a hundred feet tall, in Times Square.

Good or bad, it's serendipitous at any rate.

Everything depends on what's going on in the hundredth, thousandth, ten-thousandth of a second after the button is pressed. Light can flatter us or flatten us and fatten us. Too swiftly for the naked eye, our faces can zip through umpteen fleeting stages of goofy while shifting from one expression to the next—and only the camera can freeze them for lingering scrutiny and long-term humiliation.

But when everything really falls into place in that instant the shutter's released, when the light's a touch more than right, and every facial feature has paused precisely at Perfecto! before an eyelash steps out of line, you can wind up with a photo as celestially exceptional as the portrait of Lula Wheeler. That small, literally stunning (it stunned me) senior portrait I saw one time at Farmington High.

Maybe it wasn't serendipity in her case. Maybe she actually was so otherworldly sublime all of the time. If so, my sincerest sympathies to the boys of the charter class of Farmington (Mich.) High School—the class of 1921. They must have suffered an unremitting torment of longing from September to June.

Though rendered in black and white and shades of gray, Lula Wheeler peered past my shoulder and toward her future with eyes of luminous blue. She had the hint of a dimple in her right cheek, the suggestion of a cleft in her chin, and lips indubitably shaped by Nature to snare young men's souls with the slightest smile.

Let's just say, "Oh ... my ... God" and leave it there.

But here's the thing about all this: It wasn't just that Lula Wheeler's excruciating beauty burrowed into my brain like an ethereal projectile. It was the mind-blowing, satori-like realization that—by that moment, and as if within the milliseconds it took for the notion to lay siege on my noggin—child goddess Lula Wheeler had already lived out every bit of whatever thrilling future lay before her on portrait day '21. Had savored its every joy, suffered its every sorrow, and superseded the portrait before me with innumerable succeeding portraits marking the benign or malign passage of time.

Had already, presumably, waxed wizened and withered, or, more likely, returned to dust.

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