photos

     The past few days I have spent more time with photos of myself than I have in my lifetime.  When I was very young, and my mom would drag me into the studios of some of the more famous children’s photographers, I would either not smile or even just frown.  I hated to go and could not understand all the antics they did to make you smile.  

      When I got sick in Boston, Mom took me out of the sick bed to get one of these photos.   I was pale and thin and in pain with a raging session of colitis.   Five-year-old children don’t get colitis.  I got colitis.  The illness was severe, and we were miles from anyone in the family, and I was too sick to be moved far closer to home, wherever that was at the time.  At first, my parents thought I just had diarrhea, but the blood and high temp said, something was not right.   When the doc said I could die, we went to the photographer, and I got dressed in a little blue sailor dress with a while tam on my sick head and black patten leather shoes.   I smiled, he clicked, and I went back to the penthouse and my pj’s and the bathroom. 

     So, having pictures taken of myself has never been easy.   It was harder when I was younger and not a thin girl like my svelte classmates who were either dieting or laying in the sun.  I did neither.  While we had some financial resources, I lived in a working-class area.  When I entered Holy Angles Academy for Young Ladies, I was one of the girls that did not come from one of three feeder schools, and I lived in the Black Rock area.   There were four of us that came from that area.  2 Judy’s, Carol, and Bonny.  

    I have subscribed to audiobooks, and last night I started Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone.  I was luckier that she was, I made the team, but I never felt like I connected with the girls since many had known each other since grade school.  When you just about to graduate, there are a small number of students 10-15 that are selected as “beacons.”   I was a beacon, and I was co-captain of the basketball team and the photography editor of the yearbook that had won some national recognition… so I felt it was a default. 

    In the book, Brown talks about Maya Angelou and  “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.”  Like myself, Brown went through a place of not belonging to a family.  My cousin said to me once, and she knew she was the black sheep of the family, but she had a large family.  I was the black sheep and an only child.   I have thought of that a thousand times since I was young.

I have gone through a Norah Jones and Diana Krall albums, and my butt is tired.  enough