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| Lynne Kirlin, high school graduation photo, Council Bluffs, Iowa, 1952 |
So my brother Pat was going home
for Easter for the first time in a decade, this time with his wife, Traci, and
8-year-old son, Cullen. I’d planned to go home (funny how we talk about
going “home,” which is where our childhoods were, our family hearts are, but
it’s really so alien to me—everything that was gargantuan in my childhood, from
the yard to the bookshelves to the couches, to my parents’ bodies, seems too
small now, or else I’ve become outsized in my skin) in May, but now was just
fine. I booked a bus, and on the ride to D.C. I realized that Cullen was the
right age to show photographs to, to show him some of his ancestors.
My mom, Lynne, has always had a
very strained and complicated relationship with photographs. Growing up,
though, we had a 14” or so square wicker basket that contained all the
childhood, youth, and pre-marriage photos she and my dad possessed. Tossed into
it over the years were ones they took together, along with the holiday pictures
sent to us by aunts and uncles—cousins’ school pictures or family snaps—as well
as pictures taken by neighbors. The fun of this picture basket was that you
could dip into it and pull up a random memory, which really is how our minds
work, when it comes to that—a photo album is made to show the chronology of
events, or maybe is based on a theme of our lives, but the basket has always
felt more honest in relation to the way events will make us recall a family
story. “Oh, that reminds me of the time my
mom opened the door for Nadine’s piano teacher, and my dad was standing in the
kitchen with his back to them, pouring water from a kettle into the coal stove,
and the teacher only saw my dad’s hands in front of him and the water coming out in a
stream, and she gasped….” (That’s a memory that really wouldn’t belong in
anyone’s formal chronology of events, you know?)
In graduate school I read a book
called Storyteller by Leslie Marmon
Silko, a marvel of a book about the role of story in shaping a culture, in this case, the Navajo culture in the American Southwest. In the introduction she talks
about the Hopi picture basket, a tradition that developed once Native Americans
started accepting photographs as part of the way to tell the story of the
People; and this decision, coupled with the decision to embrace writing and not
only the oral tradition to continue the stories, was not made lightly, either.
When I read about the Hopi picture basket, I remembered ours, of course, and
wondered if it’s something lots of people started doing when they couldn’t
afford the materials, time, or even the imaginative energy needed to make
picture books.
In addition to the basket, my mom
had a photo album of her life in the United States Navy from 1956 to 1963 or so
(her marriage and pregnancy meant she’d be leaving by May of 1964), and it has
always been one of my favorite things to look at. All my life, it rested atop a stack
of art books on the right-hand side of the built-in bookshelves my parents had
put in when they moved into their house 8 weeks after I was born. We were the
only family I knew that had a “library”— and the “collection,” such as it is,
consists even today mainly of my mom’s college textbooks (English Literature, American
Literature, Plato, Spanish history, algebra, grammar), science texts (The Sea Around Us, The Microbe Hunters, archaeology,
Egyptology), Agatha Christie mysteries, and great works of literature
(Thackery, Austen, Thoreau, Twain, Melville, Cervantes, poetry anthologies, the
Brothers Grimm, the Brontes). As I say, it looks so small now, this library, but its
presence was one of those things that set the O’Haras apart from their
neighbors, another way my mom was just not like the other mothers. It made us
weird, and yet also inspired awe: "Your mom has read ALL of these?" (What choice did Miss O’ have
then?)
So the album: What I’ve always
loved about that large, square, tan-covered collection of navy-era pictures—placed
on large black paper sheets using adhesive photo corners, black or white—was
how it told the story of my mom before “us”: Scenes of my mom in the rain forest in
Puerto Rico; at the Breakers in Newport; at attention in uniformed inspections on various bases,
my mom’s tanned legs preventing a need for regulation hosiery (“My CO never
noticed the difference”); her formal naval portraits in both white and black
uniforms; and candid shots of lots and lots and
lots of parties and all the fabulous dresses my slender and glamorous
mother wore to them. My favorite of the dresses was a deep taupe, or dark
brown-grey cotton dress with three-quarter sleeves, fitted bodice and flared
skirt to the knees, with large white windowpane lines across the fabric, its
only pattern. The dress went up to the neck, but was backless, which I know
because of the photo of my mother in an embrace, the man’s arms around her bare
back, lips in a passionate (and doubtless drunken) lock—really wild to see when
you realize, “This is my mom,” and
how they all were probably 24 but looked 35, which made that photo all the
wilder.
Also there were snaps of navy
people, including the last active-duty Commodore; my mom’s CO, Lt. Doug Kiker
(who would become an NBC news anchor); Kate Barker, a fellow WAVE (they were
still called that then) who used to visit when I was little—a large woman who
looked like Kate Smith and drove a Cadillac convertible (which I asked for a
ride in by promising her a ride in our Volkswagen—and what a ride!; and Laura Corr, another WAVE, who was from New
Orleans and gave me a black Mammy doll when I was a baby (I still have her and
treasure her), because Laura was reared by her own mammy (Laura was, as it
turned out, the first true bigot my mom ever met, but otherwise a fun gal). My
mom realized later that Kate and Laura, though never with each other, were
lesbians—another interesting facet of life in the album. In the back of this same album, after her
naval career pictures, rested, loosely, various other photos, including some of
her cousins’ weddings, my favorite being an 8” x 10” of her white-tuxedoed
cousin Bob shyly posing with a silver ladle, serving punch into a silver cup to
his shy new wife JoAnn, ca. 1960, and you know full well these two were
complete innocents upon entering the marriage state; overseeing this scene was
my gorgeous Grandma Kirlin, who wore plastic floral costume jewelry like a
Hollywood star wears diamonds. I used to stare at that black and white picture
for long minutes—my twice-divorced, struggling grandma (Bob’s beloved aunt by
marriage), looking on with such love and hope at these two sweet newlyweds at
their wedding reception; but this scene is made into a story by the way my grandma, in profile, is leaning hard on the
table, the fingertips of her two hands pressed hard on the cloth, and one
wrinkled, fleshly elbow exposed below a cream short sleeve of her black and
white dress—a pose that says, however unintentionally, “Kids, good for you, but
this isn’t going to be easy.”
So many pictures: I have looked at
this album on nearly every visit since college, a flip-through of my mom’s
story, and I understood more about her because of it. I needed the proof of this album. My mom is a
very closed person, and one not given to sentiment, though she drops a story
from time to time. I said earlier that my mom has a complicated relationship
with photographs, and here is what I mean: Whenever I visited other people’s
houses, I noticed that almost no one had books, but nearly everyone had framed
photographs of family members hanging on the walls or resting at angles on
ledges. When I asked my mom why we didn’t display photos, Lynne replied
sharply, “Because it’s morbid." (She always used really cool words like that and didn't define them.) "Why do I want to look at dead people up on the
walls? And it’s silly to put up pictures of living people—I see them all the
time.” And that was that. When my friend Patty became a framer in 1988, I found
all of the 8” x 10” photos we had, along with dozens of old family snapshots that looked special,
and had Patty frame all of them. I gave them as presents to my family for
years. The year I quit teaching the first time, in 1990, and worked for a farm
paper, I absconded with the picture basket and made photo albums for all of us
for Christmas, leaving quite a pile in the picture basket nonetheless, because
I would miss dipping in if I hadn’t. To my surprise, my parents have hung all
the pictures I’ve had framed for them, and they keep the albums out where
everyone can see.
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| My grandma, Louise Kirlin, with daughter Lynne, Iowa ca. 1935, hand-tinted photo |
So when I got home on Friday
afternoon, wanting to prepare for Cullen’s arrival on Saturday, I went upstairs
to the bookcase to retrieve the navy album, but it had been moved. I called to
my mom, who was coming up the stairs, “Mom, where is your navy photo album?”
Lynne said, “Oh, I threw it out.”
Threw it out?
My spine seized. I gasped. And I began
to sob, the tears uncontrollable. “Oh my god. You didn’t….”
And Lynne surveyed me quizzically,
as she does, and said flatly, as she does, “I didn’t have any attachment to those pictures. What do
you care? Less junk to clean up when I’m gone.” My tendency to tears has always
annoyed her—I am a sentimental O’Hara, one of my many deeply unattractive
qualities, whereas Lynne, a survivor of astonishing inner strength, gets on with
it. And in this event, I had no one to share my grief with: curiously, my
father and brothers had never even looked at that photo album, had no idea what
I was talking about when I’d mentioned she’d tossed it in the trash. (Another of my deeply unattractive qualities is snooping, looking at notebooks and inside albums and through boxes. I had another moment of panic but didn't ask if my mom had thrown out her college writing, which I'd loved to read. These things are my mother's after all, to do with as she wishes. I have no claim on them. (Note: Pat just told me he snooped and looked at that album, too.)
As to the depth of my grief, the torrent of unexpected tears, what I understand now is that this is how I will feel—only more so, much more—when I learn, as I eventually will, that my mother has died.
Long Ride Home
At the Braddock Road stop on the
Metro (as I headed to Union Station on Sunday afternoon, after a very pleasant
holiday hiding Easter eggs and watching the joy with which my nephew hunted for
them; a fine day also to throw the Frisbee and the football; and to share a neighborhood
moment as we all walked down to the corner of Alaska Road where a car had
somehow crashed through a fence on one side of the street and ended up crashed
into a house on the other—Cullen even mimicked the way we all walked with our
hands in our pockets to survey the scene, trying to solve the mystery amidst
the flashing siren lights—no one was hurt), as the train doors opened, a woman
of about 40, plain-faced, her mouse brown hair chopped sharply just beneath her
ears, entered with a younger, bearded man in an army green canvas jacket. They
sat across the aisle from me, and the woman, who was speaking in the clear
voice of someone who more or less wants the car to overhear, shared her anger
and confusion over having been made to reconcile all her early years of
catechism with public school lessons in evolution (“and then later you realize
Darwin’s not right, but it’s too late,” and Miss O’ managed not to interject, “Um… actually…”), and
what a trauma that was for her and, in her view, is for all children to
learn the truth about things like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, not to be
told from the beginning that all of these things are symbols, and yet where is
the wonder? “You can only find wonder with God, and we need to teach that…,”
and the young man had his own anger over his upbringing, but he didn’t get many
words in before they exited at Pentagon City.
I’d remembered to ask Pat and Traci,
as we prepared to dye Easter eggs and when Cullen was outside, “Does Cullen
still believe in the Easter Bunny?” and it turns out he does, and I told my
mom, “Mom, Cullen still believes,” and my mom was delighted—we’d made his
Easter basket already, and now she knew to have it set out before he got up in
the morning. Lynne the Realist—the rigorous student who in her papers forever
challenged the Jesuits of Creighton University on the doctrines of the Catholic
Canon; the agnostic/atheist/do-your-own-religion woman who thinks sentiment is
stupid—this same woman is yet deeply in love with Santa, ghosts, all things
Halloween, and the Easter Bunny candy delivery system. And so I started
thinking about how Santa Claus is different from catechism teachings, er, evolution, and I remembered Pat saying
that when Cullen asks him (as he most likely will this Christmas) if Santa is
real, “I’ll tell him Santa is here,” and he pointed to his heart, “and that’s
as real as it gets.”
The science of Darwin is the
outer-directed world of measurable facts. Where God dies as a concept for so
many occurs at the point where God is treated like Darwin rather than like
Santa. God is also Santa, and the Easter Bunny—the God of any religion has to
live in a person’s heart, or not at all, is the point. I do hope that someday
that very troubled woman on the Metro is able to find that truth inside
herself—funny how a stranger’s torments can haunt me.
This got me thinking that my mom’s
photo album—her life before us—was a
tangible, measureable thing that is simply no more, just as she will be, just
as my dad, Bernie, will be; as I will be. Here and gone: to be, and not to be.
And so I am writing about it, how I will hold it in my heart, which is where it
really lives anyway. The rest is so much paper.
It’s Up to You, New York
A 7-hour bus ride into Manhattan
was made out of what should have been just over four-plus, through fog and
traffic pile-ups (though the Lincoln Tunnel would be empty and the subways
merciful), and during the last two hours a man behind me began a round of
cell-phone calls which made those of us around him want to deck him, mostly
because he seemed to want us all to hear them. One ongoing conversation was
about editing a letter, “‘To that end,’” he insisted, “should be the wording,”
at one point. He punctuated conversations with phrases like “it’s a new day,”
and with addresses of “my Brother,” and eventually I think we all began to
realize—though it took over an hour for me to realize it, and maybe I’m slow,
though I was dozing as much as his voice allowed—that he was doing his round of
Sunday night therapy calling, either as an AA sponsor or some kind of
counselor, where he talked basketball and hope, urging each person on the line
to get to the next day. The two and a half extra hours on the road may have
been the reason for the “fuck it” attitude of his natural and too-audible
voice, the reason for blithely irritating his fellow passengers while he went
about his business of saving lives. Still, I could not completely be okay with
it. If the man had preceded his calls by saying to the passengers around him,
“Guys, I am a counselor and people depend on me to contact them,” would we have
been more understanding? Or did we have to have the reasons for his calling
slowly dawn on us to reach that place? I don’t know. I only know that I could
not wait to be in Queens, in my own bed, and out of that dark night of other
people’s souls.
The Thousand Natural Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To
When I got off the bus on 7th
Avenue, I was heavy with the need for sleep, as I say, and also deeply sad. It
was partly about my mom’s discarding of an item of too much importance to me,
but really there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on. I woke up
feeling as if the world was different, this small shift, couldn’t quite figure
it out. I began writing this, and something told me what it was, and I logged
onto Facebook and there was a message from my dear friend George: “Do not go
public with this yet, but my mom died in her sleep last night…” and there it
was. George’s mom, Judy, was gone. She deserves a tribute I don’t know how to
give here, and she will have a beauty of one from her loving son.* I met Judy a
few years after I’d graduated from Bread Loaf (the graduate school where I’d
met George), but my first encounter with her gifts (aside from her son, who became
one of my best friends) was a Bread Loaf tee shirt George presented me with for
my graduation, tie dyed by Judy herself. George imitated her, “I’m not sure
what I want to do. Do I want to swirl or do a spiral?” and told me how she’d
stared and thought it through before going with pink sunbursts. I know a
hundred stories about Judy, just as George knows a hundred about Lynne. Our
moms figure at the heart of our life stories. I’d like to think my mom will be
around another decade, but one never knows. Judy was doing well up until she
was about 80, five years ago, and then began what George called “the long
fade.” Lynne is 79.
I have deeply wise friends who are
biologists and poets, some of whom reflect on death and what that means, and
some who don’t. All of them are engaged with
life, though, and some step aside at moments and wonder what in the hell that means; and others are at one with
living, present to it, and try to keep the ego out of it all, not worrying
about the meaning at all. For myself, I’m in it up to the neck and into my
head, down the spine and through the heart, ego and all, death and life, and
can’t seem to be otherwise. What I mean is, as far as I am concerned we are all
in this picture, until we are not, and I mean to keep the album and look hard
at each and every person in the photograph for as long as I can. And mean it.
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| Miss O' with her mom, Lynne, in Virginia, 1964 |
(P.S. The long fade: I made another
discovery that I really can’t bear to write about. That old picture basket? I
couldn’t find it. I guess Lynne threw that out, too. I was too choked to ask.)
(*And she does: Tribute posted on
Facebook. Love to George, Apryl, and Sam, in memory of that angel of a human, Juliana Lightcap,
1928-2013.)
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