40 B4 40: Old Timey Photos

I love pretending I’m someone else. I’ve stepped outside myself by reading novels, acting in plays, or simply getting lost in my imagination. It isn’t so much a dissatisfaction with my own life as a dissatisfaction with the fact that we are given but one life. We can choose our path, but are confined by time and circumstance. When I get a chance to pretend otherwise, I feel like I’ve cheated the system.

It’s even better when I’ve got “proof” of my alternate life, like a photo. As a nine-year-old, my parents consented to my sisters' and my pleading for an old-timey photo at a booth in the mall. Finally, evidence that I’m not only a child of the 1980’s.


Maybe I’m also a child of the 1880’s?
It seems that every historic tourist trap offers the chance to pretend one was a part of that history with dress-up clothes and a sepia toned photograph. Ever since that childhood photo, I’ve stop to inspect the pictures displayed outside these studios and must be torn away by my companions. My friends never seem as enamoured with the old timey photo as I am. I’m picking my outfit and planning my poses but they are more interested in lunch. I’m ready to escape into fantasy and they are firmly rooted in the here and now. Eager to please, I abandon my dreams and return to reality.

Since, at 40, I imagined my dreams to be forever abandoned, I added “old timey photo of our family” to my 40 B4 40 list. Making the list public not only gave me impetus to complete all forty adventures, it also guilted Beefy (who hates being photographed) into participating in my Gold Rush fantasy. (Well, it was either the guilt or the shots of whisky. Either way, Beefy agreed to play outlaw to my saloon girl.)


I like to think that Beefy had as much fun pretending as I did.