Ann Turner Cook

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a nursery: a clock, a curtain, a page turning)
And then, in the middle of all these people who were never real —

[Verse 1]
Nineteen twenty-eight. A company wants a face
for a jar of baby food, and they hold a competition,
and an artist down the street submits a charcoal sketch
of a neighbour's baby, unfinished, just the head and the eyes.
And they choose it. And they don't finish it. They keep it as it is.
And that unfinished sketch is on the jar to this very day.

[Chorus]
Ann Turner Cook. She was a real baby.
There is a woman inside the most famous baby in the world.
She grew up. Of course she grew up — that's the part we forget,
that a baby in a picture is a person who keeps going.
Ann Turner Cook. She taught high school English.
She wrote mystery novels. She had children of her own.

[Verse 2]
And she didn't know for years. Her parents didn't tell her.
She found out as a girl, the way you find out anything —
somebody mentioned it, and it was true, and that was that.
Three hundred dollars, once, for the whole of it, forever.
And she said she was glad of it. She said it kindly, always.
She said it was a nice thing to have been.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
She died in twenty twenty-two. Ninety-five years old.
The baby on the jar is ninety-five years old
and then she wasn't anymore, and the sketch stayed where it was,
unfinished, three months old, exactly as she'd been.
That is the whole strange bargain of it, right there.
She got to grow up. The picture never had to.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the clock, the curtain)
Ann Turner Cook.
An English teacher. That's the headline. An English teacher.