I Have a Picture in My Mind

I am sitting sorting through pictures, cards and memorabilia this morning trying to follow the advice I give my clients. Do I really need every Mother's Day card my kids gave me? Every picture of every trip no matter how out of focus or even forgotten? Now, where was this cobblestone street scene? I was prepared to throw out quite a few but my toss pile was embarrassingly short. And my enjoyment level very high.

I did create some order, even putting all the pictures of houses I've lived in, along with houses of parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents into one album. Till now they have just been collected in a bit of a jumble in large envelopes. Now I have an album for friends, one for trips, one for my kids, one for my husband and me in a variety of poses and countries.

I discovered a poem I wrote in 2003 in Suriname, where John & I were serving in the Peace Corps. We were riding on what we called the boom bus (for the loud, Caribbean music that played as we wove through the crowded streets) and I noticed a billboard with a little boy sitting on the floor trying on a man's dress shoe. Here's what I wrote:



I sit on the sofa icing my back.
"Does it hurt when you do that'?"
Yes.
"Well, then don't do that?
Dad wisdom or a joke he told about a man going to the doctor.
I thought of my Dad yesterday on the #1 bus
when I saw the picture of the little black boy
sitting on the floor putting on one of his Dad's
black dress shoes -- it looked like one of those
Bostonian wingtips mine used to wear to work.
The ones he loved to have me untie and pull off his feet
when he got home from work and sank into his favorite chair.
My 4-year-old feet half filled them as I clumped around the den,
making my father smile and reveling in his precious attention.
When he was feeling particularly relaxed,
he'd let me have a sip of his beer with the foamy head
from the wide-bowled glass; I always tried to get more.
I remember how he'd dance me around the room
while I stood on his feet and how he sometimes
gave my brother and me horsey-back rides before bedtime,
trying to buck us off as we clung to his neck squealing
until our mother told him to let us settle down or
we'd never go to sleep, but looking quietly pleased
that he was playing with us and giving her a few minutes for herself.
Then her bad back, which I learned later was really a deep depression.
It kept her from roughhousing with us and made her take long naps
in the afternoon, during which we had to play outside
or go to the neighbors or try very hard to remember to play quietly inside.

I don't think little boys in Suriname have black Bostonians to try on
but they probably slap around in their father's flip flops. Do they
sip from their dad's Parbo beer bottles? I know they learn basic English
from watching Amercian cartoons and they get their impressions
of how blacks live in America from Sanford and Son reruns.

Here I am in Suriname, waking with my mother's puffy eyes
from an allergy to something that blooms in the garden,
with a bad back that won't lead to a stay in a mental institution.
No, I'll ice my back and put on my own shoes and,
remembering my Saturday mornings watching TV in Iowa,
when Buffalo Bob asked, "Kids, what time is it?!"
I'll answer, "It's Howdy Doody time!!"
And I'll spend a day in South America with a pale white moon
hanging in a piece of bright blue sky
between the branches of my neighbor's mango tree.


Other treasures I discovered as I sorted: a screenplay my brother, Alan, wrote at College of Marin, a story my daughter wrote in college about his death when she was a freshman in college, the obituary my husband wrote for the newspaper. In it he mentioned that someone at Alan's funeral called him the gift giver and his son called him "the man who loved to laugh." Members of the softball team he managed said he brought them from the basement to the playoffs and insisted they have a team song: Finniculi Finnicula.

I'm working with a client in Sausalito now who lives minutes from the industrial building overlooking the water where Alan lived and I drove by the other day just to look up at his window and imagine him there. He got free rent in exchange for being night watchman and he and his son lived in a tiny space together. He was 42, on his way across the Golden Gate Bridge on his blue Kawasaki motorcycle when he hit a pothole and lost control on dangerous Doyle Drive. It was one of his favorite routes because it brought him through the Presidio and I remember driving it one time when we were visiting him. He told us his brakes were going but he thought they'd be okay. That was so Alan. He was optimistic no matter what the circumstances. He made jewelry, silver and copper bracelets, and sold them on the street in San Francisco.

Among the photos, I found some of him when he was a baby, three years younger than me. There he was rosy-cheeked in a high chair; wearing a coonskin cap; dressed in full costume as Rusty in Rin Tin Tin; sitting barefoot on the grass with two of our neighbors from across the street.

I'll put some of the pictures in albums, some back in the envelopes and then into a box to be looked at another day. Some things you just can't part with.