My Favorite Photos of Mom

I love this photo.  I like the gilded frame too.  I need to take a better one sans the glare.  Family members will recognize the location of this photo.  It is Mom's backyard.  She is standing in front of her favorite colored roses.

I love this picture of Mom.  The first time that I saw it was in Denver.  Grammie lived in an underground apartment on Detroit Street at the corner of East 16th Street.  Across the street was, and still is, East High School.  Dad, Joe, Tom, and I went down the side or back stairs, depending on your angle of the building, to Grammie's basement apartment.  Her front door stood directly across, maybe 15 feet, from the water-tube boiler that heated the building.  Grammie opened the door and within seconds she and Dad were engaged in an argument.  They went into the kitchen to talk.  Quickly my eyes scanned the room.  A black Bakelite 500 dial phone rested on an end-table next to small sofa.

           A Bakelite 500 phone.

A few pictures hung on the wall for beauty.  A dingy oval rug domesticated the room.  A window in the west wall was at sidewalk level.  Pictures on a table in the corner caught my eye--they were family photos.  As I approached them I was hypnotized by the beauty and familiarity of one.  It was my mother, a very young picture of my mother smiling, hopeful, and expressing delight.  She was beautiful; she was young; she was smiling.  This was the woman I had dreamed of, of a happy, beautiful, young mother.  And there she was contrasted with all of my sorrowful memories that I conjured and carried around in my head.  Maybe she wasn't unhappy, older, or defeated at all.  Maybe those characteristics were projected self-perceptions of being defeated by my losing efforts at winning exclusivity with and ownership of my mother, and from those the right and the responsibility to defend and protect her. I remember being lured to the corner by the photo.  I picked it up and studied every upward wrinkle of joy and optimism in a face I'd prayed for restoration.  I was falling in love with the picture for the first time and with my mother all over again.  From that moment on I saw my mother as a buoyant, youthful woman.  It in turn restored me.  By the way, that horsehead bookend was a birthday present from my sister, Mary, years ago.  I didn't like them immediately; in fact, I thought of throwing them out.  But I held on.  And now I am so happy that I kept them.  I love them.

Mama showing off her See's candy.  The restaurant looks like Alcapulco's, and the date is obviously very near July 15.  The year may be 1999.