What good advice she had given me when I was four;
What good advice she had given me when I was twenty-four;
What supposedly funny thing Father had said to her on their first date while they were watching Rhapsody in Blue, and how this should have put her on her guard;
How her teachers had mispronounced her first name and how she had corrected them and how they had tried to make her write right-handed and turned her paper so she wouldn’t write over the top of the paper with her left hand to compensate, and how she would change the paper back as soon as the teacher walked away;
How she pouted because she couldn’t learn to ice skate like the other kids, so her parents drove her to the pond in Lincoln on a freezing winter afternoon, left her there with her skates, and drove off;
What Mother had said to her cousin Jane on the day in 1972 when Jane’s doctor had told Mother but had not told Jane that Jane’s cancer was terminal;
How her father, street-cleaning supervisor of Nebraska’s capital, had known when to call out the snow plow crews by watching the density of the flakes as they blew past the streetlight outside their house on P Street;
How on a day in 1958, in her bed in Lincoln, her mother had made a groaning sound that caused her husband to believe she had indigestion, but instead she had passed away so that this groan was the final utterance of a woman who in her life had been full of funny tales, saws, jokes, comic poems, and quaint sayings.
There was even an entire cycle dedicated just to her Uncle Harve:
How many of Uncle Harve’s needlepoints were hanging on the walls of our home;
How during her childhood Harvey had come every summer from Philadelphia to visit;
How his clothes were immaculate and beautifully tailored;
How he purchased his needlepoint supplies exclusively at Wanamaker’s;
How he freehand stitched his designs of birds and Italianate villas and flowers straight onto the canvas;
How her mother sweated hand-cranking ice cream on the back porch for him in the stifling Midwestern summers, the drops rolling down her face as she packed handfuls of rock salt on the ice and forced the stubborn paddles through the slowly freezing cream so that he could absently extend a hand for the bowl without saying thank you as he sat in the shade doing needlework;
How her father had called Uncle Harvey “an old woman.”
MOTHER’S NARRATIVES WERE rigid as hymns, and the central mystery they celebrated was the unwavering primacy of her point of view, as well as the chaos that would follow should this bulwark fail. After I began making pictures, I felt like I’d found a way in past the liturgy. Before the photo project, visiting the old haunts could well mean a ride on the dragon’s tail of blue-black depression by day three. Now it began to be a little easier.
By 1996, Father had been dead for three years and Mother, in her seventies, was living on her own in her house in Redondo Beach. The sixty-seven-dollar-a-month FHA mortgage payments she and Father had begun in 1957 had come to an end in 1987, and the house was in the clear and appreciating at a manic rate. Almost every morning she walked along the ocean, taking in the breeze and counting dolphins cresting out of the grayish surge, and then drove to the pier where she had coffee with a group of her age and outlook; thus reinforced, she was home by nine and ready to meet the day, calling church and women’s group friends, meeting them for lunch, tending her roses, doing chores, and often going out in the evenings to a church function or concert at a local theater, enjoying Guys and Dolls at the South Bay Civic Light Opera, seated beside her fellow season-ticket holders with whom she had been going to similar functions since the second Eisenhower administration, a long era of good feeling.
Meanwhile, in the northern part of the state, I watched my images float up out of the fix, and gently stacked the negatives in their archive preservers one atop another in a slowly filling Gnosticism of ring binders. I began to see things differently. While I was always conscious of Mother as a lonely widow living on her own—she certainly missed Father—on the other hand, with no one to please besides herself and no one to contradict her, she was flourishing. In fact, enjoying good health, sufficient means, and a wide and solicitous social network, in a locale she loved thick with watchful neighbors who indulged her in every way, she was actually about as happy as she had ever been. Walking her miniature Schnauzer briskly along the Esplanade, carrying his carefully collected droppings in a discreetly opaque Albertson’s bag, decked out in her white Asics walking shoes, cotton sport togs, and L.L. Bean anorak, and greeting an equally cheerful parade of regulars, Mother in these years cut a satisfied figure that would not have been out of place in a photo from a California Public Employees Retirement System brochure.
On one of my early photography expeditions to Redondo, Mother had actually spotted me one morning as I was working. To take advantage of the quiet and the lustrous overcast, I’d leave her house just before sunup, load the tripod into the rear seat of my car, and move along the route I’d planned the day before on scouting walks, trying to expose at least one or two rolls of film before too many folks were up and about. Mother had been returning from the pier past the Presbyterian church, and there I was, a half block away on South Juanita, her son, bearded, overweight, once perhaps a person of some promise but now a childless and unforthcoming freshman composition teacher in his late forties, for some reason pursuing a new activity, hauling a tripod and camera around the neighborhood in which he’d grown up and, at the moment as she was driving past, hunched over and peering through the viewfinder at what seemed to be a pittosporum in a vacant lot.
Back at the house, both of us in the den looking through the LA Times, she related a story from one of the coffee drinkers at the pier, of how this lady knew all about birds and had traveled widely, how she projected an air of authority, of how she spoke somewhat gruffly with her shoulders moving forcefully as she put forward her opinions with an air of self-importance, all of which Mother imitated in voice and body language; but also, as the story went on to its second level, of how despite this spiky surface the woman was a nice person and really did know what she was talking about and so was not a “character,” and what this woman had said to the pleasant Korean owner of the small counter café where they bought their coffee, and what amusing thing he had said back in his broken English. As Father had done, I smiled and nodded in practiced response; in two days I now had this story memorized. Under the nacreous overcast of her morning get-togethers and the anxious pressure of her emerging role as an unattached person, a new colony of small, fixed narratives was forming in Mother like seed pearls. Then she mentioned seeing me. “Oh, you did?” I said. Interruptions in the flow of story were unusual, especially references to me; I had never learned not to be surprised at them, and a little alarmed. “Yes, I was on Avenue D and there you were,” she said, “and I thought: Bless his heart, there he is taking his pictures.”
In the meantime, after months of blank grief, my wife and I began seriously to consider adoption. This meant a kind of surrender, especially on my part, raised as I had been to invest deeply in the mythology of the family tree—a quest the majority of my cousins, I noticed, eschewing children themselves, had not bothered to take up. Bearing a much harder role as the matrix out of which all our hopes would have to materialize, my wife had reached a center of acceptance well before me. Months later, she was still feeling the reluctant ebbing away of the fertility drugs we’d begun injecting in her the fall before, dark tidal pulls of hormone—fabulously expensive hormone—that left her feeling sluggish, alien, out of round, and experimented upon. She was rightly tired of carrying the biological burden.