Thursday, January 17, 2008

Picnic in S_______, Arizona (ca. 1935)

I love this photograph. It shows my mother, Wanda S________ (left foreground), at roughly the age of fourteen, on a picnic with relatives around 1935. She doesn't know exactly where the photo was taken -- she didn't even know it existed until one of her aunt's grandsons scanned and e-mailed it to her several years ago -- but it certainly was in or around her hometown of S_______ in eastern Arizona. Going clockwise from my mother, the other people in the photo are my mother's aunt Vivian, her cousin Alvin R_______ (the baby), her grandmother R______, her aunt Josephine, her cousins Norma F____, Nadine S______, and Frank S______, and finally her brother Alden S______ (the blond kid looking down).

All of the people in the photo are dead now except my mother, Nadine, and Alvin, although I can remember most of them. My great-grandmother lived to be 101 years old, dying in 1973. (Incidentally, she married my great-grandfather in 1888, when she was 16 and he was 40.) We visited Josephine and Vivian multiple times in S_______ when I was growing up. My uncle Alden was killed in a plane crash, in which he was the pilot, sometime around December 1972 (which is ironic given his having survived thirty bombing runs as an Army Air Force pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II); I still remember my mother staggering into my 13-year-old arms after she received the phone call advising her of his death. Nadine still lives in my mother's hometown, and Mom and I visited with her a couple of years ago. Norma and Frank both passed away relatively recently. (Nadine and Frank were my mother's cousins on both sides of the family, as my mother's aunt Lou married one of my mother's uncles on her father's side.)

My mother will turn 87 this Sunday, January 20, so this picture seems like it's from a long time ago -- and yet it doesn't. What strikes me most about it is how hauntingly beautiful my mother was as a young girl, yet it also betrays a certain characteristic self-consciousness on her part.