I found this picture of me when I was three years old. My family had just finished eating in a Fort Worth, Texas, café with an aunt and uncle. My aunt said that I had wiped my mouth after every bite of food, which she thought terribly cute. When we got to the car, she said she had to take my picture.
My mother told me to stand by the car. I had just spent all my energy trying to be well-mannered and was now a little nervous about having my picture taken by myself. I’d never done that before and didn’t quite know what to do. Thinking I should try to hide as much as possible, I stood behind the car bumper. As you can see, it didn’t hide much.
By the time I married my hair had turned so dark brown some people thought it was black. Many years later my aunt gave me the picture. My wife was surprised to discover I had been a blond as a child. I told her I had seen a picture of my mother as a little girl in front of her family’s car and she had blonde hair too. She knew better than to hide behind the bumper so she put her hand over her face.
My daughter thought she had been adopted because she had blonde hair while the rest of us had dark hair. I pulled out this picture to reassure her we had not kidnapped her. Now she has dark hair and a little girl with blonde hair.
What jumped out at me when I looked at the old photograph was the pose in from of an old car. I got this strange feeling that if Bonnie and Clyde had a child he would have looked just like me. They posed in front of cars too. Of course, it couldn’t have been me because Bonnie and Clyde had been mowed down in an outburst of rifle fire on a lonely country road in the hinterlands of Texas and Louisiana more than ten years before I was born.
It’s just as well I belonged to Florida and Grady instead of Bonnie and Clyde. Loud noises always scared me so I’d been an emotional wreck in the backseat of the getaway car after Mom and Dad robbed a bank. With my luck one of the stray bullets meant for Bonnie and Clyde would have hit me instead. And if I had survived that day on the country road, who would have raised me? I don’t think the infamous banker robbers’ relatives would have wanted anything to do with me.
The photo did make me grateful for my nice boring family. Although at times my brothers could be real pains in the keister, they weren’t on “wanted—dead or alive” posters in three states.
This picture will be a keeper. My granddaughter will want to show it to her children so they’ll know they weren’t adopted. But that won’t be a problem if she does marry a blond-headed guy and the kids take after him.
Reflections like this happen when you get old, on quarantine and don’t have anything better to think about.