“. . . Worth a Thousand Words”

We never went out and had us a family portrait taken. We weren’t the kind of outfit to waste any money on somethin’ like that. Beer, food, a load of coal, that’s what dad was concerned with. But once a well to do neighbor woman took our picture. Me and mom and Alice and Ann went over to her house. We sat on her white wall to wall carpet and posed in front of her red brick fire place. Mom stood there next to us in her high heels . . . hiking her skirt up. She sent the photographs to the Hungarian gramma. Mom wrote the old lady that that was our house . . . that we were rich. That we owned the fancy couch and the pretty lamps on the nice end tables in front of the brocade curtains. She said the chandelier hanging from the ceiling was ours. Afew months later, Ralphie got him a paper route and bought a little camera. This time we sat on bare linoleum in our own shack. Our sticks of furniture were junk . . . ill matched and broken. We weren’t smiling. We looked like scroungy brats in the day room of some awful orphanage. Mom looked at the photos. She didn’t even seem to notice that there was no warm glowing fire place anymore, no neatly hemmed curtains, no bright chandelier, etc. in these pictures. She picked out three exclaiming, “Look how goot mein legs look!” and those were the ones she mailed over seas.