Father & Son

Every crowd in America has a few of these: a small person up on a large person's shoulders, hands wound into his hair, looking out over a hundred heads at the Fourth of July parade, the fireworks, the ballgame, the state fair midway.

The arrangement has rules nobody wrote down. The child holds on by the forehead or the ears. The father holds both ankles, keeps walking, pretends not to feel his knees, and says, "Tell me what you see."

It lasts only a few years. The child gets heavier faster than the father gets stronger, and one day the ride turns into a walk beside him. Both of them remember the view.

The picture draws the ride in a thin gray line on white: a father with short hair and a faint smile, a small boy sitting up on his shoulders with his arms around the father's head, and, below, the father's hands closed around the boy's ankles. There is no ground, no crowd and no color, only the two of them.