Anna's Fan Club

Last week I was rooting around looking for photos of my mom. I could only find about a dozen, tossed randomly in the shoe boxes in which I have housed all of my photographs for years.

I know I have one grainy, enlarged one of her at about 2 years old in a dark oval frame under convex glass somewhere in my storage room, but all these snapshots are of her over the age of 20. The earliest is one with Great Auntie Belle—probably taken about 1935—some with my brother and me, a couple with my dad, one by herself in pearls and a simple sweater, and a handful with the grandkids.

I keep shuffling them around looking for a cheery one, one that captures the woman everyone remembers as loving and supportive, kind and open-hearted. Even my boyfriends loved her.

When I dug out the photos, one of those boyfriends from 40 years ago was visiting. It was his birthday and somehow he thought traveling from L.A. to D.C. to see his mom made for a reason to come to Bangor to spend some time with me. So here we are in my living room with him staring at each of the photographs for what seems like longer than anyone, including her daughter, would choose to.

“Your mom’s not smiling in any of these,” he says, a little bemused by this revelation.

I hadn’t thought about it until now, but when I call up images of my mother, I have to admit, Mom was not a smiler. Ever. And yet we all fully expect to see her that way.

“Remember how your mom snuck you out to see me?” he asks suddenly.

“Yup,” I say. “I sure do.”

My dad, 14 years older than my mom and from the “old country,” had not considered this an acceptable relationship for his 19-year-old daughter. Dad didn’t know the half of it. Chuk was a 26-year-old, just-returned-from-Vietnam veteran who was still hitting the pavement almost every time a car backfired. But really, all my dad could see was that the guy I was dating
was black.

What my mother saw was happiness, and whether the rest of the world could see it or not, she trusted her vision and she trusted her daughter’s.
Another old boyfriend (an amazing musician—still is) called her for years after we stopped seeing each other to ask for advice on cooking or ironing, the personal relationship quandaries of his life. His mom lived a thousand miles away.

My high school sweetheart remembers how she shook a bell before she came into the front hallway when we were saying goodnight. To this day, I don’t know whether his mom was divorced or never married or widowed, but she lived with a guy. That may not sound like much now, but it sure was then—but not to my mother.

A small-town girl, she grew up surrounded by people of like economics (factory workers), like ancestry (Irish, French, Italian), like religious beliefs (Catholic). In retrospect, you’d think she’d have a pretty narrow view of how the people pieces all fit together. And yet she took everyone in as if cut from the same cloth. When her world became a little bigger—more beliefs, more ethnicities, more ladders to climb or fall from—she saw everyone as the same, everyone entitled to celebrations, a home, a family, food on the table, love.

I think Mom would be pleased to know that all of these guys are still part of my life, that we talk and laugh together, that I could call any of them tomorrow and they would be there for me, and I for them—and that they all still love her, too.