Mine is not a family with a photographed history. My parents had a hard enough time keeping their kids clothed and fed—there was no money for reams of photos and no money, anyway, for the kinds of things people documented in those days, family trips and birthday parties and fancy Halloween costumes. Of course this marks my age, too. For quite some time, now, taking photos has been easy and cheap. People document a trip to Taco Bell, memorialize a hangnail. Not so when I was a kid, even less so when my parents were young adults. All to say that growing up I almost obsessively studied the very few, the precious photos taken of my parents, my brother, my sister, and myself before we were… us. I knew who we were as we lived and breathed, but who were these characters in the photographs? Today’s shorty was inspired by a few of those photos.
Working Title: Dad and Me
1st Sentence: In the picture, he’s holding a little girl in his arms, sort of draped over his shoulder, and what amazes me, what I can’t accept, is that I am not that little girl.
Favorite Sentence: I ate a thousand bowls of Cheerios at this table, I worked out long division, here, I brooded through over-cooked spaghetti and chopped broccoli into ever smaller bits.
Word Length: 561
Photo by Berthold Werner 8/2008.
Daily Shorty 
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