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“The Photo Album: Pieta” was published in the journal\u00a0Women’s Words<\/em>, Maynard, MA, 1998.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Joe, he was such a one for taking pictures.<\/p>\n
Of course, he didn’t get the angel.\u00a0 I didn’t know Joe then.\u00a0 He said he wouldn’t have known what kind of film to use on an angel, anyway.\u00a0 What F-stop or ASA or something.<\/p>\n
Joe was the photographer in the family.\u00a0 I never even tried to learn all that technical stuff.\u00a0 Me, I mount the pictures, crop them when they need it, choose which goes next to which and so on.\u00a0 It’s an art form, I can tell you.<\/p>\n
Here’s our first house, a little ramshackle bit of a place.\u00a0 Belonged to my cousin Elizabeth.\u00a0 She let us live there cheap, and in return, I helped her with Johnny.\u00a0 He was what’s politely called a dividend baby, something of an embarrassment for a woman Elizabeth’s age, and tiring, too, for her to tend on her own.\u00a0 He was easy to take care of, fat and contented, but he always seemed to me too serious for a baby.\u00a0 It was hard to make him laugh.<\/p>\n
It turned out to be good practice for me, though, ’cause my boy, Jesse, had a real somber streak as well.<\/p>\n
Here I am fit to burst with him.\u00a0 I believe Joe took this only a day or two before Jesse was born.\u00a0 It was an easy pregnancy for me.\u00a0 Mother said I was built right, that I should have had a passel more of kids.\u00a0 But that wasn’t in the good Lord’s plans for me.<\/p>\n
Oh, here’s Joe about that same time.\u00a0 You can tell I took the picture because he’s so off to one side, like I was really meaning to take a picture of the rhododendron and got him in there, too, by mistake.\u00a0 He looks tired, doesn’t he?\u00a0 Well, I guess you know he was quite a bit older than me.\u00a0 December and May, as they say.\u00a0 Plus, my pregnancy was a strain on him, always getting teased about being a sly old dog and so forth.<\/p>\n
Now, this one doesn’t show me at my best, but I put it in because it was an important day for Joe and me.\u00a0 For all of us.\u00a0 I guess I should have known to get moving to the hospital sooner, but Jesse was my first, and I was so young and healthy, I hardly felt discomforted, so I thought there was plenty of time.\u00a0 That’s how Jesse ended up being born in the middle of the night in a Mobil station just off Route 25.\u00a0 You know the one, out there by the Planetarium.<\/p>\n
That man in the overalls standing next to the car was the owner of the station, Mr. Shepard.\u00a0 He’d been about to close up when we pulled in, Joe all frantic and me in the backseat grunting and moaning like I was pushing a piano uphill single-handed.<\/p>\n
Mr. Shepard’d been raised on a farm and had watched animals give birth, so he had some sensible advice and served as a good enough midwife.\u00a0 I didn’t really need much help anyway, Jesse came so quickly and smoothly, like he couldn’t wait to be born and get on with it.<\/p>\n
Here he is at five, in Joe’s shop in the basement.\u00a0 They spent hours there, the two of them, though somehow they never finished many projects.\u00a0 Joe loved that shop.\u00a0 I used to think he wouldn’t finish things on purpose, that he had some superstition that he’d run out of ideas and have no reason any more to be in the shop.\u00a0 After he passed, I missed the smells of sawdust and linseed oil coming from his side of the bed at night.<\/p>\n
Jesse finally tired of the shop with all its half-done bookshelves and bird feeders and end tables.\u00a0 He was around twelve when he told Joe he didn’t want to do woodworking any more.\u00a0 It’s the age most kids start to push away from their folks and try to be different.\u00a0 It’s only natural, I know, and what a parent is supposed to be building towards all along, but when it first begins to happen, when a child first accepts your kisses like he’s doing you a favor, when he starts keeping his little dreams and pains to himself, I tell you, it breaks your heart.\u00a0 It’s like losing your best friend.\u00a0 Or your first love.<\/p>\n
Jesse was a bit of a loner.\u00a0 You won’t see any camp pictures in here nor snapshots of him fishing with friends or rough-housing on the grass with other kids.\u00a0 He took after me in that.\u00a0 I prefer to keep to myself.\u00a0 It’s not often I show this album, though many have asked to see it.<\/p>\n
Here’s me and Jesse the day of Joe’s funeral.\u00a0 He was just past fifteen.\u00a0 That tie had been Joe’s.\u00a0 It was the last time I got Jesse to wear a tie.\u00a0 He picked out my hat.\u00a0 I still think the veil was too much.\u00a0 I’m not the type to carry off wearing black dotted-swiss net, but it was not a time for arguments.\u00a0 He was trying so to be grown up.<\/p>\n
My cousin posed us.\u00a0 That big stand of calla lilies behind us was from Joe’s lodge brothers.\u00a0 See how Jesse’s standing sort of apart from me?\u00a0 My cousin had me lay my hand on his shoulder.\u00a0 I’ve always thought it looks like I’m holding him there, like he’d run off otherwise.\u00a0 It’s hard to raise a boy into manhood without his father around.\u00a0 It’s a tired line, but I’ll say it: what’s a mother to do?\u00a0 I had to give Jesse his head in most things.<\/p>\n
Jesse was a bright boy.\u00a0 I’ve got all his report cards in a pocket here at the back of the album.\u00a0 He never got excited about them, but I was sure proud.\u00a0 He did especially well in Creative Writing and Public Speaking.\u00a0 And, of course, Music.<\/p>\n
They weren’t just schoolroom talents, either.\u00a0 He grew to a man that people listened to, really listened to.\u00a0 For such a quiet, solitary person, he had a way with words and a gift for making people stop and think.\u00a0 Yes, he could spin a good story, all right.\u00a0 Sometimes it’d give you goosebumps.<\/p>\n
And when he set the stories in song, well, music hath charms and all that.\u00a0 You couldn’t keep the people away from him.\u00a0 Imagine, I actually had to get an unlisted phone number.\u00a0 Why, when Joe and I first started out, we didn’t even have a phone.<\/p>\n
I took this picture in the park one day.\u00a0 With an Instamatic.\u00a0 Just look at all the people sitting around hanging on Jesse’s every word.\u00a0 That’s him under the tree on the hill.\u00a0 They all wore beards then.\u00a0 It was the style.\u00a0 I never got used to his, though.<\/p>\n
Thank goodness Maggie was there that day in the park when Jesse invited all those people to eat with us.\u00a0 I sent her running to get pizzas, but she couldn’t find a place, so she brought back tuna hoagies.\u00a0 Not everyone liked that.\u00a0 Some wanted to know how the tuna had been caught.\u00a0 We ended up with left-overs.<\/p>\n
Oh, here’s Maggie.\u00a0 See how lovely she was, and there, in her eyes, how wild and tough-like.\u00a0 An odd sort for my Jesse to have taken up with.\u00a0 Loyal, though, I give her that.\u00a0 She keeps in touch after all these years.\u00a0 I’ve got some school pictures she sent me of her kids, in another album.<\/p>\n
I took to Maggie, despite how different we were.\u00a0 We were still two women amongst all those men.\u00a0 We understood, each in our own way, about the fruited feel of strangers in our bodies.<\/p>\n
Maggie was with me that Friday they brought Jesse home.\u00a0 Here’s the newspaper clipping about it.\u00a0 You’ll have to read it for yourself.\u00a0 I can’t look at it even now.\u00a0 A fan did it, the police detective said.\u00a0 They loved my Jesse to death.<\/p>\n
His face looked so sweet, even with the sweat and the smeared stage make-up.\u00a0 If Joe’d been there he’d have photographed him, I know.\u00a0 Joe always said don’t let sentiment get in the way of a good shot: you’ll never catch the world as it really is if you do, you’ll never remember the truth.<\/p>\n
Maggie and I cleaned him with our own hands.\u00a0 She didn’t cry.\u00a0 She wouldn’t let herself cry.\u00a0 She made me touch his wound.<\/p>\n
“So you can believe he’s gone,” she said.<\/p>\n
There’s no worse pain than out-living your child.\u00a0 When I began this album, I was just a girl really, a simple girl at that.\u00a0 I didn’t know how it would turn out.\u00a0 What to expect.\u00a0 The angel was a grand messenger, no question, but he stuck to the facts at hand.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, you know, I think it all came down to timing, every bit of it.\u00a0 It doesn’t do, anyway, to always search for answers and explanations for everything.\u00a0 It’s sort of like Joe used to tell me about shutter speeds.\u00a0 You have to find just the right amount of light for a subject, so that you pull the important details out of the shadows without bleaching away the mystery. <\/p>\n “The Photo Album: Pieta” was published in the journal\u00a0Women’s Words<\/em>, Maynard, MA, 1998.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/a><\/p>\n