Riding A Camel
My Parents
Egypt
1984
While they were great travelers, they were not very interested in photography. They didn't take lots of photos and they rarely took photos of each other. But this photo showed up one day when I was going through their photo drawer in the den. As a matter of fact 30 of these photos were shoved in there.
"What's this?" I asked my dad.
"I don't know. Your mother must have ordered them for some reason. Throw them out. It's just junk we don't need," was my father's response. It was his usual response to most things. Nothing was sentimental to him. For me, everything is sentimental so I grabbed the 30 photos and stuffed them in my purse.
The photos sat on my desk for about 10 years and then, at long last, I came up with a use for them. At the time, I was a high school principal. Whenever a teacher did something commendable, I put one of these photos in his/her mailbox with a little note, "Thank you for your good work. As a small token of appreciate, please accept this photo of my parents. They are very dear to me."
I thought this was hysterical. The first few faculty member to receive the photo thought it was creepy. But then, enough had been distributed that it became a faculty joke and the photos were showing up on teachers' bulletin boards.
A teacher reported to me that one kid asked her, "What's with this old couple on the camel? I'm seeing this photo everywhere."
The teacher replied, "I don't know who they are but I love the camel. Don't you."
There was no further discussion and I was sorry when I ran out of photos, because in their own silly way, they did stand as a statement to the teachers' good work.
