My father took many pictures of my mother and never got rid of any, even the double- or over-exposed ones.  So there are many from which to choose, some good and some not so good, and I have spent far too much time making my selection.  To make it more difficult, my favorites are, as you might imagine, ones never intended for the general public; images of my mother which (to me at any rate) represent my dad's not always entirely successful attempts to capture something in her only he could see.  I like to think I know what he was going through.  Even a stranger, however, judging from the evidence, would be forced to acknowledge the fact that my mother possessed a changeable and elusive beauty.  Not that she changed over the years, although of course she did, but that she could look so different from moment to moment, from day to day.  There are shots of her I barely recognize, and not just because I was too young at the time to remember.

So for today, I'm going with an image of complicated narrative.  First of all, as you see here, my father and I are both photographers.  What I am taking a picture of is presumably that urban landscape below, which is Pittsburgh.  You can make out one of the three rivers -- which one I have no idea -- are we on top of Mount Washington, looking down?  We must be, but then what bridge is that?  Are those steel mills?  I'm not sure and, not surprisingly, any image I might have taken with that littte mint green Brownie camera has disappeared long ago.

This, as you can begin to appreciate, is a picture with ambiguity and layers, not just of meaning but of generations, hence the complexity.  My father is taking a picture of all the important women in his life, (and mine): his mother, his wife, the daughter (my older sister) who came with this marriage, and the daughter (my little sister) who came from this marriage, as did I.

Look at how many stories are going on here.  There is my mother, pointing and explaining, instructing, talking.  She was a teacher as well as a mother and wife.  My older sister is caught in a slightly awkward pose, maybe reaching instinctively to adjust the glasses she has started not wearing because she's a teen-aged girl in the midst of an era that celebrates the teen-aged girl like she's never been celebrated before -- think of Gidget (Sandra Dee for the film; Sally Fields for the TV series) or Annette Funicello, (Mousketeer turned Beach Blanket love interest) and oh it was a simpler and more complex thing being a teen-aged girl in those days, wasn't it.  

Then there's my grandmother, a nineteenth century lady and so always a bit removed and a little distant from the rest of us, always vaguely distracted as I remember her.  Mother of the photographer, here she is gazing off across the city where she'd been a teen-aged girl herself in 1904, and a bride in 1913 and a mother in 1916, and where she lived to be a wife and mother and widow and mother-in-law and survived two world wars along the way too.

Oh, and there's my little sister, tucked in behind her grandmother and her mother, the only one looking at the camera and paying attention to the fact that our picture is being taken.  Of all of us, she is the most observant.  By contrast, look at me, obllivious -- who knows what I'm taking a picture of.

But besides an interest in amateur photography, I have come to realize (just recently, as a matter of fact)  that my father and I have something else in common, that we are both inclined, I think, to the same kind of relationships.  They are the kind of relationships I like to call the Die-Trying variety.  Die-Trying relationships can be inherited (a parent, a sibling) or they can be acquired, even sought out, but they all have the same basic characteristics. 

A Die-Trying relationship goes something like this: you are beautiful and precious to me and I love you, and you have problems.  And because I love you I want to fix your problems.  I want to fix your problems because possibly I hope you will love me if I do, except I don't know if I can because you seem to have a lot of them and they are complicated and I am probably not the man (son, lover, brother) to do it, and maybe I am not the right man and maybe not man enough, especially if I am correct in thinking I heard you say that someone broke your heart which only makes me want to try harder, because you are beautiful and precious to me and I love you even more for that and for your problems which I don't know if I can fix but I will die trying.

My grandmother came to live with us when my grandfather died.  It was not a happy solution to the problem, but it was the best my dad could come up with.   When he married my mother, she already had three children and he tried to be their father as well as being father to two more.  It was the best solution he could manage at the time and I believe he really did try, but his efforts were not, I have to admit, always fully appreciated, not by me at least.  Some things take a very long time to understand.

My grandmother passed on to her reward in 1970, and her son and only child followed her a year later.  My mother lived another twenty years after my dad, still dealing with those problems of loss and heartbreak he might never have been able to fix for her, no matter how long or how hard he tried.  But now I know he would have kept on trying.  I can tell from the pictures he took of her, in all her moods, in all her looks, pregnant and happy and sad and pensive.  He would have kept on trying to find the solution in the same way he kept trying to capture and understand that beauty he saw in her, in the happiness and in the sadness, whether it was the woman with a baby in her arms or the woman just looking at a view and pointing, explaining something she thought we should know, not even aware in the moment that he was watching her and trying to take her picture, trying to do everything he could, so very much in love with her, and with all of them, all the women he loved. 

And I loved too.  And still do.  Happy Mother's Day.