gifts from God

My mother passed away several years ago. Before she died, I had an opportunity to have some long talks with her, and I found out some things I never knew.

One thing I found out was about my high school picture, not pictures. I did get my senior portrait taken, but it was a chore, not something I wanted to do. The picture turned out with, I thought, kind of a forced goofy smile because I tried to smile around a crooked tooth. Perhaps it was I just was too nervous to smile properly. Anyway, I didn’t think much about the single picture my mother had bought and proudly displayed at home. To me it was just a picture, but to her, evidently, it was much more. I was the eldest of six children, and because I was the first to graduate from high school, the picture must have meant a lot to her. I never realized exactly how much.

My mother was a proud woman. For instance, although I’m sure we must have qualified for free lunches, my mother and father always came up with lunch money for us. At the time, I took this for granted, but looking back, I can see this must have been a difficult thing for them to accomplish during those times my dad, like so many others, was laid off from work. There are some who cannot conceive of the difficulty. These are the ones who have always had extended family or friends to help when money was tight. These are the ones who have always been beyond living week to week. They have no concept of a family never able to take a vacation or never able to sit down in a restaurant, fancy or not, together to share a meal.

As my mother lay, dying of cancer, she asked if I remembered what had happened so long ago to that senior picture. I did, vaguely. A reporter from a newspaper, a beautiful young woman I liked and trusted, had borrowed it to copy for publication with an article she wrote about me.It’s funny what I remember about that time, and what I don’t. I do remember the young woman reporter inviting me to go get something to eat at one of those drive in places where they brought trays to your car and me, respectfully, declining because I had no car, and more importantly, no money at the time. The young woman must have sensed this because she had even offered to buy. I guess, if I thought back to this time at all, I had thought back more often to what I later suspected was my foolish pride in declining her offer as an opportunity lost more than I thought about the picture that had been lost.

Anyway, my mother at the time had kept asking for the picture back, and the reporter kept looking for it, but somehow, it was never found. I’ve thought back as to why that particular picture was borrowed. Perhaps it was because that was the only picture of me in a jacket and tie, and my mother wanted me to look good in the newspaper.

As she lay on her deathbed my mother shared with me what she had done to get that picture. I paid no attention it of course, but the pictures were sold only in packages, and my mother, at the time, could not afford any of the packages. She had gone and begged, begged, the photographer to sell her just a single print. You do not know what an honor, and how touching, it was for me to find out that my mother had given up some of her immense pride because she wanted a souvenir, a single picture, of how proud she was of me.

There were other things I had always wondered about, but just never found the right time to ask about my mother. I took this opportunity to ask her to remember a time she and my father had argued, because I couldn’t. She gave a gentle laugh and explained that, of course, she and my dad had fought, but never in front of the children.

My dad told me a new story about this time as well, and I thought I had heard them all. He spoke of needing some money for back rent by the next day and having absolutely no way to get it. At the time we lived in clapboard temporary housing put up after WWII for returning GI’s. It was still standing in the early sixties. The rent wasn’t much, but since Dad didn’t have it, it may as well have been a million dollars. As he sat on the front porch that evening wondering how he was going to get out of this dilemma, he saw a man walk across the field. He walked right up to my dad and asked him if he could move some items out of a warehouse, but it had to be that night, because his lease was about to expire. My dad had a beat up old truck and the man had heard, correctly, that my dad was a hard worker. The man was apologetic, and concerned my dad might not help him out, since the amount of money he could afford to pay was very limited. As it happened, the amount of money was exactly the amount of money my dad needed to make up the back rent. The job, like my mother, was a gift from God.