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Flashback Friday


Here I am at home with Magic, the great boxer we had.  I don't have much to say about this picture as I have no info on the date, who took this pic or if anything special was going on.  I will say just a couple things before I let you go on this Friday.  If pinned on a time I'd have to say sometime in college but I really have no idea when.  And that is probably the most Mona Lisa-esque look I have ever seen on my face.  

 The first thing I'd like to say is the near perfect original quality of this Polaroid.  I have mentioned before that I my first couple of cameras were Polaroid instants.  The high cost of film was somewhat mitigated by the instant picture.  It may seem a bit odd, but film developing in the 70's and 80's wasn't necessarily the slam dunk it is today.  Back then there were limited places to get film developed.  I really can't remember the place to get film developed in Aledo, maybe Johnny Johnson's place, or maybe the drug store.  In G-Burg there was Midwest Photo.  Nowadays with digital cameras and memory cards all you have to do is stick it in your computer and that's it.  Back when this picture was taken there were occasional reports about how Polaroids would fade, discolor or even become invisible.   I didn't enhance this in any way.  Note the rich dark greens and blues of the shirt as well as the brown fur on Magic.  This is much older than the 25 year life-expectation of Polaroid film they forecast.  

 Secondly, look at my right hand ring finger.  Yup, my high school class ring.  The stone was black onyx.  Sharp looking thing, but alas, I really wasn't much into rings, neck chains and that sort of thing.  I no longer have the ring.  I honestly have no idea where it ended up, but I have a best guess.  And that guess may be way off, but best i can remember, I was working at MDH and back then, in my early years, the staff was responsible for cooking on weekends. It wasn't really as daunting as you may think, really.  We bought food in bulk form and if we had hamburgers all you had to so was double the number of kids and throw the frozen burgers on a large grille oven we had.  Same with most everything else.  I do remember a couple of disasters: once when I did a horrible breakfast (sausage was burned, eggs were green, and biscuits were screwed up as well.  When I took a tray of this stuff down to one of the lock-ups, the kid asked, "Who the Hell cooked this shit?"  All I said was, "Our new cook, stay out of trouble."  Another disaster was when Pat and I tried making homemade doughnuts.  I can still see her walking out into the kitchen with her arms out with flour all over her from head to toes.  Damn those electric mixers!

 Anyway,  I recall having to fix meatloaf one weekend and this was generally pretty fun.  Throw the crushed crackers in along with eggs,  Worcester's and spices and then roll up your sleeves and play frontier veterinarian with it all in a large bowl.  I believe, that my ring came out in that batch of meatloaf.   If so, someone gnawed on that baby and probably decided this was a treasure best kept to themselves.  If that is what happened it wouldn't be impossible to sneak it out, our full body searches were more thorough coming back in.  Can I say with full certainty that's how I lost it?  No, but that is what has been ingrained in my head all this time.   

 There was an obscure movie I saw many years ago.  A narrator at the end says something to the effect,  "I found a diamond in a mountain of glass."  Probably what the guy who bit into my meatloaf thought, too.  Just goes to show you how easy it is to make.  You can throw anything in it and it still tastes good. 

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