Virtual Me

Last year my oldest son submitted a photo of me to the Seattle Mariners for a life size cardboard cutout promotion that filled the baseball stadium with virtual fans. After the season, I began populating group pictures with cardboard me in the back row where you cannot see that I have no legs or hands. That way I can snap the picture and still be in it. Cardboard Geoff appeared in a winter photo published in our Community Association newsletter. I looked more real than the snowman. We put a winter hat and jacket on cardboard me for an outdoor Easter picture this year where real me appeared as well. I have been accused of trying to look younger but the cardboard version is in his late 60’s and looks plenty old. If my vanity is going to be exposed, I would like my cardboard rendering to be in his 30’s. After I retired, I organized our photos and distributed many to our children. But I also made three albums spanning my life with pictures I am in. This seems excessive but if you keep a dozen pictures for each of my years, you start edging toward one thousand of them. But I lived too long and a daughter-in-law gifted me with a fourth album which I have begun and cannot expect to fill. I suggested to my wife that she should include my carboard likeness in photo sessions after I die and continue adding to my fourth album. You would think this was the most outrageous thing I ever said the way she carried on about her eagerness to tell our kids what I was proposing. This was one of those moments where I pretend I was only joking.