Mom, page 3
A photo I wish had is from the bachelor party. Late at night, the night before they were to be married, Dad called Mom and said, "Do you promise me that no matter what they tell you in the morning, you'll still marry me?"
"Why of course."
"Even if they have pictures to prove it?"
I know the people who were at that party. I know they were in the background howling with laughter.
The note in her handwriting on the back of this photo says, "Last day of our trip, middle of Ohio Aug '46."
Click to enlarge
After spending all the money Dad had saved during his years overseas in the war on a Manhattan honeymoon (Waldorf Astoria and Broadway plays) they leisurely drove back to Cincinnati along a northern route stopping in antique stores along the way. On their last day they bought this spinning wheel. It remained in their residences until Dad was
gone and Mom moved into an apartment. Occasionally she spoke about what they had to go through to get it in that car.
She also spoke about the first morning of their honeymoon. Over breakfast Dad said, "You do think you're going to be able to learn to cook, don't you?" As romantic as his words had been up until the moment of marriage, according to Mom they already had become the opposite.
That evening, as was customary for her, she ate a light dinner, but then at bedtime was hungry and wanted something to eat. At her parent's house, it was normal to make a sandwich and sit around the kitchen table talking before going to bed. Dad said "No." He said that she should learn to eat at dinner so she wouldn't be hungry later and wouldn't take her out for a sandwich. For the rest of her life she told that story.
They were two people bent on being in control. Within weeks she wanted an annulment, but had no place to go if she left. It was different back then, as she always repeated. My whole childhood I assumed that when my brother turned 16 she was going to leave Dad. Common wisdom at the time was that it was bad for the children if the parents split before the children were 16. I used to hear her telling her sisters that she was going to stick it out that long.
Well, as we used to mutter, the first twenty years are the hardest.
In all of Mom's life, this was one of her favorite days. Her youngest child and her sister's youngest child played house in the sand between the two cottages on the beach all day.
My recollection is that she told me to get my box camera and take these pictures. She'd never done that before, and never had focused on an event like this. So it was one of those moments that separated itself from other moments in a way that made it so that 40 years later the memory of it replays from the low vantage point of a small child looking up at larger people. I was barefoot. The floor on the porch was sandy in spite of the water bucket everyone stepped in to clean their feet before entering the house. She was facing the screen smiling, watching my brother and her niece. A few times over the years she asked if I could find these photos and show them to her. Click any photos to enlarge.
She's in the lower right corner of this photo of Christmas carnage in the family room from when we were teenagers.
One of my friends from childhood read in the newspaper of her passing and wrote to me reminding me of summer afternoons the neighborhood children spent either in our pool or on the screened porch, in wet bathing suits, wrapped in towels, playing board games for hours. She remembered how Mom would come out and ask if we were hungry and make lunch for the whole neighborhood. It was normal for her to have enough food on hand for that, a practice I carried on to the amazement of my friends until I married more reasonable grocery habits.
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