In the early 1920s a phrase was coined which stated, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That being the case I started thinking, “Maybe my audience includes story writers who don’t know they can write stories.” So here is my idea, I’ll post some photos and you make up your own stories of what you think happened in each photo. Then I will tell you the real story behind the photo. We’ll compare your creativity with the truth. This will save me a great deal of time that I would otherwise have had to put out for this week’s blog post. It seems like a simple exercise; let’s try it.
THE DIRT DEVIL
Look at this photo. Notice the pain on the poor girl’s face. This very easily could be a drama, maybe even a suspense novel. Have a story in your mind? Go ahead and write.
THE REAL STORY:
That young girl is my daughter Kalene. After a morning of watching “The Little Mermaid” for the 10,000th time, I told her that her Saturday job was to vacuum the stairs with the Dirt Devil. This was obviously not what she wanted to do with her day and she put up quite a fuss.
I was working in the art garden when I heard the front door open. Kalene ran out onto the porch and yelled, “Dad, help me!”
Looking up, I noticed the Dirt Devil sucked tight to her head. The motor seemed to be smoking also.
I ran onto the porch and switched the motor off. Apparently, she had wondered what the beaters would feel like on her head. Well, the beaters wound her long hair around the shift all the way to her scalp. I did what any loving dad would do. I said, “Don’t move, I’ve got to get my camera.”
After two photos, we went through the half hour process of unwinding her hair from the vacuum beater. That section of her hair was very kinky and curly for the next week. After all my help, she still blames me for making her vacuum the steps.
THE DRONE
How did you do with your first story? Here is another photo.
Notice the pain in the poor girl’s eyes. This very easily could be a drama, maybe even a suspense novel. Have a story in your mind?
THE REAL STORY:
Ok, this may have been my fault. Notice how the drone is once again tangled in Kalene’s hair? This time it didn’t kink her hair although it did chop out a section which we never found. I do want to note that I advised her against being on the property while I attempted to fly the four propped beast.
THE PORTA POTTYS
Take a good look at this action shot. Mom has shot out of the outhouse so fast; the door has not had the chance to close. Could your story be a murder mystery?
THE REAL STORY:
As a joke, I took this photo of mom up at Baker Lake. I kept it in case I needed to use it against her someday. Sure enough, mom was asked by relatives to attend a wedding some 500 miles away. She didn’t want to go and didn’t have an excuse, so I offered to handle it for her. I emailed this same photo to all of her relatives with a note stating: “Sorry but mom cannot make it to the wedding this weekend. Due to her trick bowel, she cannot get far from the restroom.”
Mom thanked me profusely for my help.
THE STRIKE
Here you will see a photo of me in my work attire at Intalco. I have a gob of something white on my nose and glasses. Is your story idea about paintball?
THE REAL STORY:
My job involved working on top of a quarter mile roofline. I would spend four days each week washing vent filters. In the spring each year, the seagulls would come to build their nests for laying eggs. Three weeks after sitting on their eggs, the chicks would hatch. The adult seagull parents are very protective of their chicks and when I got close to the nests on the roofline, they would attack. Now seagulls are extremely stupid birds, but they are amazingly accurate when they dive and poop on you. The white on my nose and glasses is indeed gull poop. I must also add that for the rest of the day, I had the taste of seafood bisque in my mouth.
Was your story anything close?
THE VILLAIN
Now for our last photo. Your story should be about the Villain and Belle, only reversed. You should be writing a melodrama. Envision the music of a bar-room piano in the background. Go for it.
THE REAL STORY:
This photo was taken for our wedding announcement. Apparently in 1986 it was illegal to rustle cattle and so I was given a choice: either marry the Dutch girl Cheryl or be hanged in the morning. Not one for long deliberations, and the train was coming, I opted for marriage and on November 8, 1986, the Dutch girl Cheryl and I were wed. I can honestly say that she is a wonderful woman, a loving mother, and the perfect grandmother. Her influence on my life and my thinking has made me a better man to the point where I can truthfully say that I have almost completely given up any future desire to rustle cattle, at least not close to a railroad track.
How did you do? Are you ready to write your own blog stories? All you need is a lifetime of experiences and photos which you can embellish, a son to build the site for you, and a circle of friends to encourage your creativity.
Good luck and thank you for taking the writing pressure off of me this week.
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4 replies on “Stories From Photos”
Great stories Marty. I’ve really been enjoying them a lot. That picture of your Mom – hahaha. I am however a bit concerned about managing a jump suit in a porta potty!
This made me Lol … clearly remembering when my kids were little and Dennis and I were busy following the Air Force. My mom was missing a lot of their firsts, so I would send her picture albums and then write (what I thought was funny) captions and stories. She thought I was the next Mark Twain… gosh I miss my mom. Thank you for the memories and I think I’ll pick up a pencil (do they even make pencils still?!) again…… keep on keeping on Marty!
I say the poor little girl’s father was too cheap to buy her a curling iron, so he said, “Here, try the Dirt Devil. It’ll put a curl in your hair.” As for giving her the helipad hairdo, probably just going for a different type of curl while still avoiding the curling-iron purchase.
O.K. Since you mailed this one out again, I’m going to take a second stab at it now that I’ve had more than a year to carefully think it over:
Clearly, the cute little girl is the daughter of a not-so-famous inventor who aspires to be like her father. (Because, clearly, had he been a famous inventor, the maid would have been vacuuming the stairs so the little girl could live a proper little girl’s life.) Like all of us, she hated vacuuming the stares more than just about anything. However, monotony is the true mother of invention as it leaves the mind with nothing to think about and plenty of time to wander. So, as she was vacuuming the stairs, she noticed what a nice job the vacuum did of laying down the shag carpet in perfectly straight, clean lines. Having curly hair, inspiration struck, and she realized she could perhaps use the vacuum to comb her hair into tangle-free perfection. A gold nugget and a dollar sign flashed in her eyes, just as was known to happen with her father, as she realized the fortune she could potentially make by selling vacuum combs with roller brushes that both combed out your hair and vacuumed it clean at the same time. So, she decided to test it on her self with the Dirt Devil as her prototype. (We see how that went.)
Never to be defeated in her pursuit of hair refining inventions, we see this same girl years later, all grown up, testing another one of her inventions. She had been watching her father, the inventor, as he was flying his new drone and heard him muttering to himself, “All those years as a helicopter pilot, and why didn’t I think to invent this thing? I could’ve been rich.” She saw a faint glint of gold nugget and dollar sign that could have been flash in his eyes, and the glimmer of illumination in his eye made her think, “You know I see another potential use for that device.” What she had noticed was how its rotary bladed looked much like a lawnmower but with safe flexible technology. So, when her father set the drone down to enjoy a sweating glass of ice tea on the patio, the girl slipped off with the controller without her partially deaf father hearing her. Then, when he was looking the other way, she pressed the joy stick on the controller upward and lifted the drone off from the table beside him, which of course he still did not hear, and flew it over to herself. “If it could potentially mow grass,” she thought, “perhaps it could also trim hair.”
As with her father’s inventions, neither was quite a marketing success, but the spirit of invention never dies. If it took Edison a thousand tries to come up with a light bulb who knows how many bad mowings it might take to get a decent haircut?