My Last Misadventure of 2010

Articles from Boomer Magazine in Richmond, VA

Monday, 31 January 2011 09:34

BY RANDY FITZGERALD

In October of last year, Barb began a project to gather up all the old photos in various drawers and boxes around our house and put them neatly into matching photo albums with labels like “Our College Years,” “Jobs and Hobbies” and “Children’s Pre-school Years.” It took her until almost Christmas to get all the snapshots filed away in some logical system, and she ended up with more than a dozen albums, which were scattered around the house for much of that time until she cleared a bookshelf on which to exhibit them.

She had so much fun going through the old pics and was so satisfied with the end results that she decided to give all the women she knew a couple of empty albums as Christmas presents. Each of her sisters was to get two albums apiece, as were my sister and sister-in-law, and then there were a number of her friends, too, who would be recipients. And because that meant a lot of extra presents to wrap, she enlisted my aid.

When I was an undergraduate at UR a hundred years ago, I had an afternoon job in downtown Richmond working for an elderly lady who printed and packaged insurance forms, mailing them off to insurance companies around the southeast. My job was to wrap those forms for mailing, a skill I mastered against all odds, and to this day I still remember how to make neat corners and wrap a package securely and attractively.

So I gathered up photo albums in both hands, wrapped them beautifully and either placed them beneath the tree or sent them winging on their way to their varied destinations. A few days before Christmas, waving a nice leather-like white album in the air, Barb asked me why I had left that one out, had failed to wrap and mail the one in her hand. We were both baffled as I insisted I knew I had wrapped every album that had been on the table.

The mystery was solved on Christmas Day when one of Barb’s friends called to thank her for the two albums, but to cautiously ask about the one labeled “Randy’s Childhood Years.”

“He was a cute baby,” her friend said, “but the picture of him naked in the bathtub was probably too much information.”

When Barb got through laughing, she said, “Just be grateful he didn’t mail you the one labeled ‘Honeymoon’!”

Randy Fitzgerald teaches modern American literature at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.