This blog challenge prompt is to pick a picture and write about it. I’m going to give you a few.

First up, we have this little gem. It was a summer day in Glasco, KS, in the early 1970s (1972 or 1973, if I had to guess). Mom dressed me and Jon up in cute little outfits and took us down to the grocery store where a photographer was set up and taking pictures. This was a small-town grocery store with shelves crammed full of goods and a wooden floor. Jon and I were only 20 months apart in age, so Mom was wrangling two toddlers for all intents and purposes. Jon was not a fan of any activity that didn’t involve his tricycle or his Tonka trucks or just running amok outside in general. My biggest complaint that day was that the elastic in my bloomers was cutting into my thighs, so I wasn’t being my usual patient self, but I was holding it together better than Jon. Mom picked her battle and the bloomers came off so she could concentrate on keeping Jon from absconding. By the time we got to the front of the line and climbed up on the little platform, Jon was in a right state about the entire ordeal. Mom and the photographer were trying every trick in the book to stop him from crying for the photograph, including waving a toy in the air by the camera–hence why my hand was up in the picture as I tried to grab at it. The powers that be shined upon us in that instant and Jon smiled and the picture was obtained.

I don’t know if we were immediately hauled home or if we got to walk across the street to Dad’s car repair garage, but odds are pretty good that we got to pop in and say hi to Dad for a few minutes. I always enjoyed hanging out at the shop. We were allowed to roam up and down the dusty, oily aisles of shelves containing parts. Dad’s pen holder on the counter was a distributer cap. Hanging on the wall was a gigantic moose head with a red ornament on the nose in a nod to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He had a pop machine there that gave you ice-cold bottles of pop for a quarter. If I were lucky, Seymour would stop by while we were there. He was an older gentleman who always wore a pair of overalls with a piece of clear tubing in his pocket that was at least 2 feet long. He had lost his voice box, so he couldn’t talk, but he would motion me over and hand me a quarter to get him a Mountain Dew from the pop machine. He would let me pop the lid off with the built-in pop bottle lid opener, and then with a twinkle in his eye he would haul out that long piece of tubing and poke it in the bottle and use it as a straw. It worked much better than a regular straw that was too short and would get lost in the bottle if a person didn’t bend the end first. If we saw Seymour out and about around town, we could always get him to swing us around by the arms as if we were flying.

This is a gift I gave Jon years ago that he had on his desk at home–I had edited a caption onto it that reads “I smile because you are my brother… I laugh because there is nothing you can do about it”.

The picture seems innocuous enough. It was taken about 10 years after the other picture. We got all dressed up and went to the education center of our church in WaKeeney to have our family photos taken for the church directory. They took pictures of our entire family, one of the parents alone, and one of the kids alone. What you don’t see is that Jon had quite long fingernails, and said fingernails were digging into my shoulder deep enough to leave marks through my shirt. If there is one thing our family knows how to do, folks, it is to smile through the pain. Jon’s smiling smirk tells you how much he was enjoying inflicting pain at a moment that I could do nothing about it. This is why it was the perfect picture for this caption when I gifted him the frame. I figured eventually he would take out the picture and replace it with one of his choosing, but apparently he liked it as is.

Let’s jump ahead another 10 years to the early 90s. Grandad Oscar has entered the chat! We were in my home in Hays, and Grandad had stopped by for a very rare visit. When Jon and I were little tikes, we only saw Grandad when he snuck into the state and stopped by long enough to say hi and then got the hell out of Dodge cuz inevitably someone ratted him out to Granny and she called the cops on him for dodging child support and whatnot decades before. Grandad was barely 5′ tall, whereas Jon had hit 6’8″ by the time he was an adult. Jon had on his work clothes, since he was working at Taco Shop in Hays at the time; it must have been shortly after he started, since he had cut his hair short to get the job. My cat Taime loved the smell of Taco Shop and would roll all over Jon when he came over after work. It got to the point that he would just toss his visor to her when he walked in the door so she could have at it. I was in a Fort Hays State University Memorial Union Activities Board Major Concert Committee shirt, since I was the ticket sales manager for the big-name concerts we held on campus each year. The house was a 1970s mobile home, so of course it was wall-to-wall paneling and brown-on-brown furniture. I had bookcases crammed everywhere I could fit them.

Just for fun, here’s another picture from the same era of the 90s. Jon was not in work clothes this time, but he was with his best feline friend Taime. As I said, I had bookcase crammed everywhere. It is one of my favorite pictures of Jon since it is how he looked when he wasn’t dressing nicely for work and could just be himself. The red splotches on his hand and face are just poor picture quality.

So yeah, hope you enjoyed these pictures and accompanying stories–see ya next week!