My Three Sons

An ancillary benefit of being back to where it all began (in addition to getting to practice my tech support skills for the oldest computer users in the world) is that I get to rifle through the 'rents stuff to find miscellaneous trash 'n trinkets of what has gone before. It's like studying archeology but for crap.

As the last kid you can see a marked difference in what the oldest kid got and what I got. There are scrapbooks from my sister's formative years: college papers (a B- btw), baby teeth, bronze shoes, pictures of her first steps, prom photos and the flotsam and jetsam of growth in the Midwest. As you survey the intervening brothers, you can see a marked decline in the historical chronicling that takes place. By the time you get to me, the fourth and final kid, it's a battered shoe box with my birth certificate, a vaccination record (rabies, distemper, heartworm), and a crayon drawing of Mommy.

So it is with some joy that I get to look through my parent's photo albums. These are where people stored pictures before there was the interweb and Flickr. Mom used to carefully file away photographic evidence of growth progressions. Oh, and pull them out when your girlfriend visited to make sure she was so appalled by you hair choices that no pre-marital intercourse would ever occur.

I can only think I'm wearing those cheap glasses because I had broken my good pair playing basketball. Again.

I'm of indeterminate age in this picture but obviously it's at Christmas. It's of sufficient age that the Big Bothers were still on speaking terms. And this is the brief moment when I had been talked into having a perm. This is The Hair of Which We Will Not Speak. And check out that flannel, ladies. Yes, the little acorn from which the Mighty Oak of a Big Strappin' Mountain Man would grow was already manifesting itself. At least I don't have a cheesy porn moustache or a winged collar going.

My niece thought this picture of her Uncles was so funny that she laughed for 15 minutes straight. And then declared me the illegitimate child of Harry Potter.