The only remaining member of my mother and father's immediate family is my mother's youngest sister, Terri, who is on her way to being age 94. We speak fairly frequently though she lives on the East Coast. She is fortunate that her nieces on her late husband's side are so very attentive to her. She still, officially, lives in Manhattan but in the last year, those nieces and their extended family have managed to get her to spend more time with them at their homes. She just came back from Florida with them and insisted on being returned for at least a few days to her high rise building smack in the middle of New York. She is slowly going through her things and deciding what she needs to keep and what can be discarded.
When we talked recently, she was reminding me that my late mother, who died long ago at the age of 48, had been her matron of honor at her wedding in the late 1940s. She mentioned a photograph she had on her dresser of my mother, and father, from the wedding day. I have been in that room, but frankly, I had forgotten about the fact I probably had seen it on one of my visits in the past.
My aunt has no familiarity, at all, of things technological. She barely manages an answering machine. But she asked her grand nephew, who, when she does insist on being in her apartment, stays with her during the week, if he could send me the photograph.
It is actually one of the few of my mother and father together. I may have one or two in my memorabilia. I suppose that is largely because my father was the one who usually took pictures, and he even was a bit of a creative in that regard. Many he took of my mother when they were engaged and just shortly after they married circa 1946. They were lovely, even innocently sensual shots of a young woman who dreamed of being a model but never quite had the, let's call it. . ."oomph" to persist.
I want to veer a little here. I used to be into psychology. I actually was both a client and an official student of the practice. I worked as a trainee therapist for about two years before I gave up the idea of switching to the profession from the law. There is this not very scientific test used, well it was, who knows if it is any longer, called the Thematic Apperception Test. A series of pictures is given to a patient/client. The patient is asked to describe, to tell a story about the pictures. It gives a therapist or test examiner an idea of how the person responds, or thinks about life, or about the people around him or her. It tells you something about personalities and dispositions when two people see the same picture and one describes a happy scene or can interpret the scene with positive nuance (maybe this, or maybe that) and the other describes a depressive one, or even a tragic one. Or a third sees nothing in particular at all.
Well, I guess my photo brought to mind the thematic apperception test. Now, of course, if this were a real test for me, the picture would not be of anyone or any scene with which I would be familiar. There wouldn't be a context in which to judge the circumstances and the state of mind of the people so as to be a kind of tabula rasa for the state of mind of the person doing the interpretation in this case, me. So, the analogy is not quite solid. I knew these two individuals, one better than the other, clearly, as I was 20 when my mother died and 54 when my father did. My mother was an enigma. My father was as well, but there was more time to unravel his pattern, and he left behind a lot of writing that complements my own experience and the stories of others. So, admittedly, my interpretation of this photograph is inevitably colored by my own observations of these two unique individuals to whom I owe my existence and my relatively successful navigation of life thus far, with its commensurate (to all of us) bumps and detours. One thing the picture reminded me of--I miss them, both. Each is half of me.
Something has occurred to me as I have charted the course of this entry.
Let's do a little TAT with those of you who take a look, if you are of a mind. If you like, in whatever fora you choose, tell me what you see. A few of you know me a long time, and will know how I might or might not interpret the scene and the people. But try to stick to the photo itself and tell me the story of these people as you see it. And then, in a couple of days, I will offer further thoughts.
Here is a teaser about my father, that is a fact. He is wearing a ring. I never, in life, saw him wear a ring. When he died, he had no rings. There is a story about that ring. I have to do a close up and see what kind of ring it might be. It might be a college ring because he had just graduated on the GI bill. The people we think we know are fascinating. Even the people we don't know.
Maybe one day this photograph will be in some antique shop and someone will stop by it and make up a story of the people in it long gone. That is a kind of nice earthly immortality.
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