Real Men of Posturing

After my mother’s death a couple of years ago, my sister took the family photo albums and assorted boxes of pictures to someday sort them out and distribute them evenly (or at least fairly). I got my allotment in the mail a week or so ago. I’ve been going through the pictures and have come across a few that I hadn’t seen before, or at least don’t remember. One of them is below and it made me laugh.

It’s a picture of me and my father (I’m the short, shirtless one with the wheelbarrow!) next to where we were having an addition put on the house in the summer of 1969. You can see the foundation in front of us.

The joke here is that my father had zero manual labor abilities, and let’s just say the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. Believe me, we did nothing toward building that addition other than my parents signing a check or loan papers or whatever. I’m not sure if this was my mother’s idea of humor (she must have been taking the picture) or what. Or maybe we were really moving that dirt somewhere and she felt it to be an historic moment worthy of capturing on film. Anyway, it’s the only picture you will ever see of my father holding a shovel.

It’s odd that some of the pictures I’ve come across are in such bad shape. This picture is as faded as something taken in the 1920s rather than the summer man first landed on the moon. Just bad film quality, I guess.