Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2009.

Despite my mother’s countless assurances to the contrary, I was not really “such a good boy.” I wasn’t even a marginally good boy. Apparently she has forgotten the almost daily ritual of sending me to my bedroom to “contemplate” my bad behavior before I was “ready” for my spanking.

(When I was in my room getting ready for my spanking, I wasn’t contemplating, I was putting on underpants. When I finally emerged, I was a skinny kid with a rear end like the Pillsbury Doughboy. I think my father appreciated the scam — I was so fatless that if he’d struck my rear unpadded he might have broken a hand bone.)

“Here,” my mother says triumphantly, handing me a thick photo album. “You’ll see, you were such a good boy.”

Apparently I’m about to see a bunch of pictures of me being not bad, which I guess therefore prove I must have been good. I turn to the section tabbed as “Bruce, our First Born Son.”

There are no other sons of which I’m aware, though perhaps this photo album will prove otherwise.

The very first photograph is me, after a fashion — it is one taken in the dermatologist’s office, a grainy close-up that focused in on my raging adolescent acne. In the background, my nose dominates the horizon like Mount Hood. “Did you make this album for Scientific American?” I complain. “This picture looks as if it were transmitted from a Mars probe.” I turn the page and find several photographs of a girl named Nancy Masterson, whom my mother adored because Nancy loved my mother. Seeing her, my mother sighs: “There’s Nancy. She had such a thing for you.”

Nancy used to come over to our house and, if I didn’t let her ride my bike, would sit on my head, grinding my face into the dirt. What I remember most about Nancy was the taste of our backyard. That and hypoxia.

“She still talks about you, you know,” my mother says wistfully. My mother continues to believe that Nancy and I should get married, despite impediments such as Nancy’s husband.

“When was the last time you spoke to Nancy?” I challenge, reflexively using my tongue to probe between my teeth for soil.

“It was very recently,” my mother asserts loftily. “She came over to show me her new baby.”

“Her new baby? You mean the one who just graduated from Harvard?”

“Nancy said that someday you’d be a fine father,” my mom says meaningfully, clearly implying that in this scenario, Nancy would be the fine mother.

“What do you mean ‘someday’? Don’t my three children qualify me yet?”

“It’s a shame none of them applied to Harvard,” my mother replies, which I take to mean that if I’d been a fine father, they would have. “You could have gone to Harvard.”

“Sure. Except for grades. And test scores. And tuition.”

The next picture is one of my sister and my mother, smiling and, oddly, not fighting with each other. I chalk it up to trick photography. “Not sure why there’s a photo of you two in a section about me,” I grouse narcissistically.

“That picture always reminds me of you, for some reason,” she explains.

“Sure, that makes sense.”

The next one is, big surprise, the despised Nancy Masterson, standing with some guy I don’t recognize. “Who’s this guy with his arm around Nancy?” I demand jealously.

“That’s you,” my mother pronounces over my shoulder.

“That is not me,” I respond testily. “If it were me, Nancy would be using my head for home plate.”

“A mother recognizes her own son.”

In the photo, Nancy is gazing very affectionately at the guy. I feel betrayed. Nancy was supposed to love me, yet here she is running around behind my back. “It’s her husband, Mom. See his Harvard sweatshirt? We’ve established I didn’t go to Harvard.”

“But you could have,” she responds.

I turn the page and find more shots of the two lovebirds. “So the Bruce section of the album mostly has pictures of Nancy and her husband,” I say flatly.

“That’s you,” my mother insists.

She sighs. “You were such a good boy.”

(Bruce Cameron has a website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com.)

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