Somewhere up in the Very Back Room, in a cardboard box full of faded leatherette albums filled with yellowed acetate sheets of pale Instamatic images from the Pleistocene era of our marriage and family life, is a picture of our eldest–then about a year old–gnawing a turkey bone. She is sitting in a high chair in the midst of our little apartment on Southside, Birmingham (La Clair Vista it was called, and the vista was anything but La Clair in the smoggy days before the Clean Air Act.) All around our young daughter was the chaos of Childcare By Husband, the flotsam of apartment life for which there is no storage, no hiding, no pretending–though, granted, it could have been more organized.
And seeing young Abby attaching the turkey leg on Tuesday brought back those memories, and later ones of her momma’s eating habits later in life–the slurping of spaghetti in particular–that became issues of eating etiquette of a similar kind to “don’t cram food into your mouth with your fist”.
And for this, a twenty-something-year-old Abby will berate me, much as her mother does for the picture that hangs on our wall showing her at three, sitting on the front steps of our Wytheville home in town, her index finger imbedded to the middle knuckle in her left nostril.
But hey–what are daddies (or grand daddies with cameras) for anyway?
We have some amusing childhood photos of our kids, but none like that! I think if we had one, it would have been confiscated by now.
If parents can’t embarrass their grown up kids who can?