I’m tempted to extrapolate, the polite way of saying I want to make stuff up. I can’t help it.

I want to give him a story, a history and a life full of odd coincidences and trivial choices that turned out to be momentous when viewed through the lens of hindsight. I at least want to make him 33 years old, and therefore a contemporary of a Springfield, Illinois man who was just starting a career in law.

But I can’t. I have scruples. Also a limited imagination.

So he was just a guy, a Parisian, who wanted to get his shoes shined, his boots blacked. He stopped and sat down one day in 1838, on the Boulevard du Temple, a popular and busy street, and got all shined up.

I can at least imagine that he never knew that Louis Daguerre had a good view from the window of his office, high up and blocks away. Experimenting with primitive photography (the first permanent photo had been taken only a dozen years before), Daguerre needed a long exposure time, 5-10 minutes, long enough to blur into nothingness any other human figures, including the bootblack.

But this guy needed his shoes shined, so he sat still long enough to be preserved on a plate. And then, I suppose, wandered off to do something else, never knowing his walk-on role in history, unbilled and anonymous. This was the first photograph of a human being.

Twenty years later, our lawyer friend in Illinois would develop sort of his own fascination with photography, or at least the historical nature of it. Abraham Lincoln was a homely man and he knew it, and we know it because he posed for portraits often and continuously until, in fact, just before his assassination in 1865. By then, of course, photography was becoming a pretty big deal, as was Lincoln. I have no information about the state of his shoes.

This intrigues me for reasons I can’t quite explain, not the history as much as the untold stories, the uncredited cameos that get captured in a trick of light and shadow. The war ends, a sailor spontaneously kisses a stranger, it stands for something but the story stays quiet. The sailor had a name, a life, a past and a future, and that’s what I think about.

I had another brush with history and bit players recently, thanks to a friend pointing me in the direction of an online video. In the late winter of 1906, less than 20 years after its prototype was first constructed, someone stuck a movie camera on a San Francisco cable car and preserved several minutes of life at the turn of the century. I’ve watched it several times now and my jaw still drops from the strange and the familiar, all wrapped up in black and white.

People walk back and forth in front of the moving car at crazy angles and apparently nonchalantly. Horse-drawn wagons and early autos jut back and forth almost whimsically, as if their drivers had never heard of straight lines. There are some women but mostly men, walking, waiting, standing and talking, everybody wearing hats and apparently socializing perfectly fine without cell phones.

A lot of research went into this little piece of film, apparently. It was placed in time by meticulous tracking of shadows and study of license plates. It can be set with some certainty in mid-March of that year.

And we know that the film was sent off to New York to be developed, something to be grateful for, considering that a few weeks later San Francisco would be virtually destroyed by the great earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906.

There are ghosts in this short film, stories we don’t know and lives that have been finished for a long time. It’s possible that some are still around, the newsboys (my favorites) hauling around papers half their size, but survivors of the earthquake have been fairly well documented and the stragglers of over a century are probably all women.

This has nothing to do with me, or anything that crosses my path in 2010. Nothing to do with healthcare reform or climate change or spring training.

It just struck me that this film was taken 52 years before I was born, and now it’s been 52 years since then. As a boy I knew people who remembered 1906 well, and there were plenty of them. What seems ancient and grainy, unfamiliar and even alien was once fresh and new, filled with simple stories of life and adventure and jobs and family, and I just wish I knew more of those stories.

I can still appreciate my ability to watch, though, from the comfort of my home and at the push of a key, and so I click “replay” and watch again.