A Meal to Remember

"The Moment of Truth"

Meal time, that time of the day when one takes a break and sits down to break bread, or in this case mussels, with family and friends. So, what is so special about this meal you ask? Ok, you did not ask but it is my blog and to caption this with a title like "Son Eats....Again" would be anti climatic and leave little else to say given the nature of the image. When I go through old family photographs of major gatherings - read Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter - the majority of the photographs are taken around the dining room table with everyone either consuming the cook's offering or sitting around afterwards. What is it about eating that makes for such a plethora of photos? I am sure that there is a sociology or anthropology paper buried in this phenomenon somewhere.

So, back to the photo at hand - what makes this meal more memorable than others. First of all let me predicate this explanation with the fact that Malcolm has inherited traits from both his mother and me; his eating preferences are most definitely those of his mother. Introduction of new food is something that is usually laborious and time consuming and requires a fair amount of negotiation. Also, Malcolm, being a typical teen, has grazed his way through his teen years and spends more time looking for the next meal than pondering the last. This is one meal however where he both tried something new of his own free will and accord, liked it very much and refers to it often when the subject of trying new foods is brought up. While sitting at the cafe we hypothesized about what it would be like to live in a coastal town like Dieppe while watching several of the other students on the trip with us try, and subsequently spit out the offending mollusk; another aspect of the meal that Malcolm relives with some relish.

The photo is taken at a little cafe on the Dieppe waterfront just after we completed our tour of the Castle that overlooked the beach landing zone that the Canadian forces attacked on 19-Aug-1942 as part of operation Jubilee - an operation that from a Canadian standpoint can only be viewed as an unmitigated disaster.

No that is not Photo-Shopped!

Images can be deceiving - here my son, Malcolm, works to create a photo-shop effect without the use of image editing technology. 

As a teacher I am reminded constantly that trends change quickly in society - especially within the lives of our youth. What is cool today is gone tomorrow. Hairstyles for instance - wow - if you do not believe me go to any school and look at pictures of their graduating classes - it is a testimonial to the fact that what is cool today can quite often be gone tomorrow - and in the case of some of those hair dos and don'ts one might breathe a sigh of relief.

The trend that is being demonstrated here is the art of photo jumping. The photo is taken in the courtyard of the royal palace at Versailles - the hunting lodge that Louis the XVI turned into an 18th Century Euro Disney for his courtiers. The structure and grounds are impressive and the French government is to be commended for its efforts at maintaining the palace and grounds as a national treasure.

Back to photo jumping - this is the art of getting another party to take a picture of you and/or you and your friends jumping. For this to work everyone's feet need to be off of the ground at the same time. The effect is to create a photo that looks like you have been photo-shopped onto a pre-existing image. I took many of these shots for a variety of my students while on the '09 Canadian Battlefields tour of France, Belgium and Holland. My reason for selecting this shot with my son Malcolm is because of all of the "jump shots" that I took on the trip, or was shown by laughing students, I found that this was the one that most looked like a person was being photo-shopped onto an existing photo.