I’d never seen this photo until my sister sent it to me. Canada, summer, cottage life. Of course I looked down when someone was taking my photo. I’m guessing I’m around seven years old. My parents are in the background over my right shoulder. If I was seven, my mom was forty-one. She looks so exotic to me in this photo, like a movie star all in white with her sunglasses and headband, gesturing as if about to take her glasses off. She wasn’t a movie star. She was a very busy mother of five children. One of the last things she said to me when she was fifty-eight and near death was she thought she had a pretty good life. Good kids, nice home, husband, etc. She was running the internal assessment as her time ran out. But I wonder if she had dreams of something bigger. Dreams that this could have been her in the photo below. Same headband, same dark eyes. But that’s Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, one of my top ten movies. It came out in the same era this cottage photo was taken. I’m sure my mom saw the movie. What she thought of it, I’ll never know.
