Today is such a beautiful early summer day. The temperature is hovering around 85 degrees. With low humidity, a walk to the mailbox was a delight. When I got back with the mail I joined my husband on the porch, sitting in well-worn, comfortable wicker chairs and enjoying the quiet view into the words. Our conversation was light; commenting on the day, the birds in the woods and eventually to a remembrance of my mom who died in 2004 at the age of 84.
She was one of those people that stayed alert and young in her thinking regardless of her chronological years. She entertained us with her observations about life and her unwavering sense of humor.
Willy suddenly laughed and said, “Do you remember when your mom got those weird photos when she got her pictures developed?”
I laughed back and said, “There’s no way I’ll ever forget that” and we laughed together.
I told Willy maybe I could do a blog about it and he said I’d have to word it just right while being careful not to use offensive language. I told him I thought I could do that.
We came back in the house because we both had stuff we needed to do and now here I am about to attempt to put together a blog entry about the ‘mama incident’ that made us laugh so as we enjoyed revisiting it while sitting on our porch on this lovely warm summer day.
When my mom was in her 70s my stepdad had a series of strokes. Unable to care for him after that at home, he ended up being a resident in a local nursing home. Never learning to drive, my mom depended on rides from friends to visit him several days a week. When I got off from work in the afternoons I would pick her up and take her home.
During this time Willy and I gave my mom a new camera and she developed an interest in small-time photography. This was before everyone on the planet had digital cameras and cell phones that doubled as cameras so her film had to be developed, which took up to a week at a local CVS or Kroger.
She enjoyed taking an occasional picture of hers cats, the bird feeder on her deck and the squirrels that invaded the feeder and squandered the bird seed away from the birds. When Willy or I or a friend took her to buy groceries she would turn her film in to be developed and would pick the pictures up when she had the opportunity to go back with one of us to pick up a few groceries.
While she was playing around with her experimental photography, she took her camera with her in her purse to visit my stepfather in the nursing home. While there she took a number of photos of my stepdad and his roommate … two elderly, debilitated men sitting side-by-side in their wheelchairs. It passed some of the time for her and maybe made them feel important in some way.
One afternoon when I visited her at her home after work she said, “Let me show you these pictures I had developed at Kroger.” She handed me the packet of pictures and I took them out.
To my surprise and genuine shock as I leafed through the handful of pictures, each one was of a partially dressed young man, wearing an unbuttoned blue and white striped shirt and not another stitch, exposing his full frontal “man parts” while standing in front of a bed upon which he had spread out numerous copies of Penthouse Magazine. Most of the magazines were open to the Centerfold of the Month, even more scantily dressed then the man who was the focal point of all those pictures. They were startling and graphic and … in some weird way captivating. Once seen they couldn’t be Unseen.
My mom asked me if she should take them back to Kroger since they had obviously mislabeled and confused picture packets and she obviously had NOT been the photographer of the day on that Penthouse photo shoot. I told her she definitely should, so we decided to take them back right then while I was with her.
On the drive to Kroger I asked her how long ago she had gotten the pictures, assuming it was very recently, and she said, “Two weeks.” We both laughed until our sides ached. I didn’t ask her why she had waited two full weeks to show them to me, she apparently knew what funny thing I was thinking and likely to say, and we both laughed again and had a difficult time stopping.
We took the porn photos back to Kroger and she told the man behind the photography center desk what the problem was and showed them to him. While he seemed equally horrified, there was an obvious amused glint in his eyes because I’m guessing he was thinking what I was thinking when my mom, a “mature” woman in her 70s, showed them to me.
She asked the photography center guy what had happened to her photos and he said the best he could figure was that they probably had gotten the envelopes switched and my mom’s photos went to the Porn King in the Penthouse photoshoot pictures … the pictures that had apparently entertained my mom for two whole weeks. He said he doubted that she would ever get them back.
We had a pleasant ride back to my mom’s house. Talking about those mislabeled photos, we enjoyed sharing again the laughter that was now a huge part of our afternoon surrounding my mom’s side-step into Penthouse Pornography.
When she went inside and I was leaving she laughed again and said, “Can you imagine what “Porn King” must have thought when he opened his packet of pictures? He was expecting those pictures of his naked afternoon romp with centerfolds and what he got was 10 photos of two old men in wheelchairs in a nursing home.”
We laughed all over again and I said I wondered who had taken “Porn King’s” Penthouse photos. My mom answered with a smile, “Whatever you’re thinking, I can assure you it wasn’t me …”
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