After the show, an image that is not Mom appears
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 12:48AM
;)
I did my little show tonight at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and it was a lot of fun. The theme, of course, was how I was forced to shoot with just my left hand after my injury, and how this led me to the G9 pocket camera and the resultant images.
About three million people came (and considering that the entire population of Alaska is about 600,000, that's a pretty good turnout) and each one of them let me know they enjoyed it.
Afterward, Jacob, Lavina, Kalib, Melanie, Charlie and Lisa and I all went to get a late dinner at a place on 3rd Avenue called the Snow Goose. I would have ordered a snow goose, too, had there been one on the menu, but there was not. Yet, the halibut tacos.... OOOOOHH!.... exquisite!
I can still taste those tacos.
On the other side of the table from me were some large windows, darkened by the night. And I looked at one and saw... Mom... deceased now for almost three years... looking back at me.
It was a hazy, mottled, reflection of a poster that hung on the wall behind me. "Who does that look like?" I pointed to the reflection and asked Melanie, who, at times, appears to me to be a darker, taller, version of Mom walking. "Gramma," she said, without hesitation. When I got home and put it on my computer screen, I called Margie out.
"Mom," she said right away.
;)
This is the poster that made the reflection. Doesn't look like Mom... and yet, it does. Interestingly enough, my mother often speculated that maybe somewhere back in her family there was some Asian blood. On my Grandmother Roderick's wall hung a portrait of my Aunt Myrtle, mother's oldest sister, who died in her mid-twenties, before I was born.
When we would visit, I would study that picture for long periods of time, and then at night would lie awake in bed trying to imagine what this beautiful girl with the delicate, Asian-like features had been like in life.
For Mom to make that speculation was a bit amazing, because, from the time that I was small until the time that she knew that I was going to marry an American Indian, Mom was adamant that when the time came, we were all to marry within our church and race.
About the latter, she changed her mind after she met Margie.
She loved Margie.
And who could not?
Mom was a teetotaler and considered alcohol a gift from the devil.
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