Food Muse

Some of my mom’s special talents include descriptions.  The process of describing certain things may take hours.  It may be a meal, a talent, a chair or a picture, yes I said picture.  Why on earth would you need to describe a picture?  If memory serves me well a picture is worth a thousand words.  I would guess for posterity purposes you may need to document names, dates or places to preserve the memory.  Back in the day, photographs were not automatically dated, especially in the case of the Polaroid.  Ah yes the Polaroid, remember snapping the picture, the heat of the flash bulb that burned your dad’s fingers when he changed bulbs to take four more pictures?  Remember the sound of that little motor churning out an undeveloped square which would magically turn into a photograph?  Because of the sometimes inconsistent development there was a need to verify in writing the actual picture.  Marie has yet to figure out modern technology.  My mom is the Queen of photograph documentation.  Now you may be wondering what the hell this has to do with the subject matter of this blog, I’m getting to that.  She would take pictures of everything at any family function, her little insta-matic clicking away.  She took pictures of relatives, presents, walls, pets and most importantly the food table.  She would take her film to be developed, pick it up and proceed to document the subject matter of the picture on the reverse side.  This process would be completed before anyone could view the pictures of the most recent family function.  This documentation of purely visible subject matter makes very little sense in my world.  Like I said before, some notes are needed.  But really, does every picture need a description?  The day following my wedding ceremony my mom had a small party.  She did everything as aforementioned.  Once the pictures were developed she sent Sue and I the memories, all with her personal descriptions on the reverse side so we would clearly understand what the picture actually represented.  The kicker, which made laugh hysterically, was the pictures of the food table.  There on the reverse side of the picture, Marie’s handwriting, “12/23/1995 Ham sandwiches.”  C’mon mom, really!  Do I really need clarification of this?  Ham sandwiches!  What else could they be?  I keep these memories safe because I may need to reference the subject matter in case I forget what a ham sandwich actually looks like.  Marie has the cure for amnesia!  Her picture documentation is unparalleled.