Picture this...

This post inspired by Juli.
Go read her post before reading this. That's an order. It will make you smile.

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Back in about 1988, my mom had foot surgery and came to visit us in Southern California to recuperate a little. I promised to take good care of her, keep her off her feet and just generally make her relax, which I did.

Eric and I had just returned from a two week visit to Louisiana with our sweet little boy.

This was back in the days of actual (gasp) FILM cameras. Remember those days? Yeah. You took photos, then you sent the film away, then you waited days, sometimes a week or more for your pictures to come back... and then half of them sucked.
At least half.
Sometimes you had to shoot three rolls to get one or two 'keepers'.

And you always ordered double prints, it was a lot easier than trying to find the negative and remember to take it in the next time you went to the store and ordering another print. I'd taken several rolls of film while we were in Louisiana, it was the first time many of the relatives had met Matt, who was a little over a year old when we visited.

Mom and I went grocery shopping at Safeway near the end of her visit when she was walking a little more. I picked up my photos from the Louisiana trip at the little kiosk in the front of the store while she grabbed a shopping cart.

As we walked through the store, I went through the photos, glancing down at one and handing it to her as I looked at the 2nd one of the same thing. Double prints, remember?

And we were chatting, filling up the grocery cart, talking about dinner and her return trip home etc as I went through the photos.

Swamps and Egrets and oak trees and a boat tour and some alligators and some Wisteria (We'd visited Avery Island, which isn't far from my inlaw's home.) Oh, look, a photo of little Matt kissing Granny on the cheek. Little Matt sitting with great grandma Neda. Another Egret. A big toad we saw in the back yard.

It got so I wasn't even looking at them as I went through the stack, just sort of on autopilot, handing the first of each two to her as we chatted, when for some reason I glanced down at the picture in my hand just before I handed it to her.

It was a picture of the, er, crotchal region of a wet, nude man at  about half-mast. Surprise!!

I managed to nonchalantly slide the photo and its duplicate behind the stack I was holding, and Mom didn't even notice anything.

When he got home from work, I followed him down the hallway into the bedroom and wordlessly handed him one of the two photos of his frontal anatomy.

Raised an eyebrow.

He burst out laughing.

Laughed even harder when I told him that I'd almost handed it to my mom.

And yes, I still have the photo. :)

While I was working on this post, I sent a link to the preview to my friend Portia, who pointed out that he had seen my mom's equipment. (and yes, I wrote about the occasion, but am having a little trouble locating the original post...)

Although technically correct, I reminded her that Mom's exposure happened many years later, and it's hard to return the favor before it's happened...