Moms, Memories, and Pictures

Had a bit of back and forth with dear friend and wonderful photographer Matthew Jordan Smith in the last few days. He’s coming off of publishing a monumental effort called Aretha Cool, a celebration of the life of the Queen of Soul. It’s also a celebration of Matthew, in that the intimacy and emotions portrayed come from his own empathetic heart, and his innate ability to obtain, in honest and human fashion, the trust of his subjects. He and Aretha were friends, and it’s apparent. The relationship is deeply heartfelt. It’s the only way you get pictures like this.

His own heart has had some bumps over the last period of time. He lost his father a while back, and now, just recently, he lost his mother. As he said on his Instagram, last year he was celebrating Mother’s Day with his mom, and this year, all he has are the photos, eloquent and wonderful.

It prompted me to think about how photos are indeed, truly important, especially in the age of the digital quickie, the two second Instagram swipe, powered by fingers that move too fast. They are our footprints, proof we were here. Touchstones that reflect our past and, occasionally, point us to a future direction. I wrote a blog years ago about the passing of my mom and the simple fact I needed to photograph her as her life force was waning. I wrote thusly, below.

Every once in a while, you might get a feeling you need to shoot a picture…I would follow through on those, no matter how awkward, or sad, or inconvenient it might be. Over the years, I’ve made pictures of some feelings. Missed lots of times. Some, though, I still have a picture of, and I’m glad I do. Those pictures, of those feelings, have become my memory. When I saw my mom over that Christmas, I had a feeling it would be for the last time. So I turned at the door, and made a picture, hard as it was. Things were bumpy between us, sometimes. Sometimes just damn hard. But I’m glad now I have the photo, as she faced off with the white light of eternity. She passed soon thereafter. Being a photographer, I was in Singapore, and I said goodbye from afar. A cautionary thing about the life of a photographer. We can get so wrapped up in photographing the lives of others, we don’t show up for our own.

My mom? She was a tough Irish lady with a trip wire temper and a pretty good right cross. She was also a good mom, in her way. She spent her life raising three kids, fiercely, and uprooting us as my dad kept changing jobs. He was gone a lot, so she bought and sold five homes on her own, and stuffed all of us and the dog into a Plymouth Belvedere, and headed for neighborhoods and schools unknown. She also spent her life doing battle with just about anybody she felt looked at her cross-ways, which was just about everybody, including, maybe even especially, her own family. She always spoke her mind. And if you didn’t agree with her, you were just, you know, wrong. Her steely bluntness made for lively family gatherings, which diminished in popularity and numbers over the years.

Mom was a sword that cut both ways, of course. Her fearsomely direct approach to parenting left you no doubt as to where you stood as one of her kids, to be sure. But woe to someone she thought might have crossed one of us! One of my high school teachers who didn’t care for my attitude, an Irish Christian brother no less, drastically re-jiggered one of my grades once to negatively affect my GPA. She went to the school and fixed it, and him. I’m sure he said his prayers that night with renewed vigor.

Neighbors were an especially favorite target, especially if they had the temerity to actually stick around, and plant bushes she didn’t find attractive, or re-grade their property so that by her lights their runoff water would then hurtle, Niagara-like, towards her property. Once, a neighbor came over to ask her to shut down the light bulb she kept on overnight above her driveway door. He alleged it was keeping his toddler up at night. I don’t think it was reasonable to ask a 75 year old woman living by herself to shut down the comfort of a 60 watt bulb in the driveway, really. Neither did Ma.

She nodded when informed of the youngster’s sleep travails, and thanked the neighbor for the information. The very next week, after a visit by an electrician, her driveway was lit up with multiple 150 watt floodlights that sprayed so much illumination her place looked like a POW camp, minus the razor wire and the bark-less Dobermans.

All of mom’s flinty antics were of course amusing and exasperating until they became serious. As the police chief of her town said to me and my sisters, “We really don’t want to put an 85 year old in jail. But she has to stop.” Ma was pushing it. In the end she was the one who moved.

We had our disagreements, to be sure, and long periods of stony silence as the years wore on, as she got ever angrier at the world and her diminished power over it. “Aging gracefully” would not be a phrase to be applied to mom. Eventually, given the haziness of her memory, she softened a bit, and there were a couple of visits. At almost 97, she could hear and see just fine, and took one aspirin a day as the sum of her medication. What she couldn’t do particularly well was remember.

She had flashes, though. That last visit, I do think she recognized me, if only briefly, and she reached to hold my hand. As difficult as it was, I made a picture.She’s gone now. True to form, she resolutely refused to share space with my dad, preferring to go with her mom and pop, at rest in the Bronx. The ground there will be richer for her presence, I’m sure. And, if a tree ever grows out of the earth where my mother lays, I guarantee you it will be a tree to be reckoned with.

More tk…