Camera-shy all my life, I happened to have a borrowed iPod on hand when I was told to bring in two selfies for an upcoming poetry workshop on the theme of Narcissus. I stepped outside, snapped a few shots, returned to my couch, and was aghast to see what I'd become: grim and gray with a worry line cut deep between my eyes and nose, plus a frown like an anchor of sadness. An old man. A miserable old man. What the hell had happened to me?

Not that I didn't see my face in the mirror every day, but the mirror must have lied. I was a good actor, I guess, when I wanted to look handsome to myself. Narcissus brushing his teeth or toweling his hair like a Wild Man after the shower.  Like an X-ray the iPod cut through my vanity. I thought I'd been good at hiding my disappointments. Apparently not. There for the world to see: my wary eyes, my downcast cheeks, my failed life.

In those years I still had a landline, not yet sucked into the iUniverse as I am now. I also hadn't had a camera since college when I took a a photography class that persuaded me this was a serious pursuit that demanded the kind of effort I wanted to put into becoming a writer, instead. Life moved on. I was young and married in the city, then single in a Catskills log cabin. Now I lived in a cottage on the outskirts of Woodstock. I kept a scrapbook of photos taken over the years, but nothing like today when every social event shows up on Facebook. I didn't often see a portrait photo of myself. The iPod told me I might never want to again.

What saved me was thinking of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills. Maybe the selfie needn't be of me, not the true me, but of a character in a scene. Maybe I wasn't posing to win over Match.com, but to be moody and intriguing. As a fiction writer, didn't I already spend my days cooking up fantasies? I went back outside to see what little dramas I might create. Myself walking on a lonely curve in the road. Myself peeking out from behind a birch tree. Then I came upon an old mattress thrown in the roadside weeds, so I got to roll around as if I was a feral man who made his bedroom in the grass. Before long, I had the camera bug. Who needed a polished camera smile? I was having too much fun being weird, being me.  

Christmas was never my favorite. My father and brother would soon arrive for a three day visit sure to turn into an eternity. That year, like every year, I was late buying gifts. To cheer myself up, I decided to start with a present for myself, so I walked into the fancy toy store off the Village Green in Woodstock, a shop for wooden rocking horses and stuffed animals, anything but Superhero plastic. It took me all of a moment to decide. There filling the wall behind the cash register was an array of large rubber animal masks. The Bear, of course, had been my totem twenty years earlier, when I'd left Manhattan for the Catskills cabin and had hung a Cherokee bear mask by my door, my guide to wild solitude. But I lived in the village now and wanted a new animal for myself. Also black, there it was, the Crow, rude and regal and fiercely independent, losing nothing of its wildness by living among people. I plunked down my credit card. The mask wasn't cheap, but it was Christmas, the season for expensive whims.

What would I do with a Crow mask? I had no idea, of course. Wear it for my father and brother, the least likely pair to laugh about anything that wasn't politics. Save it for my next trip to my cousin's family in Cleveland, who were sure to smile, but not until next Thanksgiving. As I stepped out the door, however, I suddenly had an idea. Why not try a Crow selfie in the graveyard? I did. It worked. Since then my life hasn't been the same. Crow shots everywhere from fire hydrants to factory ruins. Other masks in time. Dolls. Graffiti faces. The countless ways we represent ourselves without showing ourselves. As Oscar Wilde once said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."