By Josh Olsen
I’ve been obsessed with this photograph for months. It’s a photograph of a copy of a photograph taken with my mom’s prepaid cell phone. I’d never seen it until my mom sent it to me buried in a text, and I’ve been obsessed with it for months.
The photograph is of my mom and my grandma, posed together on the grass. They’re in Orlando, Florida, in 1974, where my mom, my grandparents, and my uncle, my mom’s younger brother, were briefly transplanted from Wisconsin while my grandpa worked as a chiropractor. My mom says the photograph was taken at a company picnic for my grandma’s job at Robinson’s Department Store, in the Orlando Fashion Square mall, and I wonder who the photographer was, and why he was even there. Was he hired by Robinson’s for the company picnic or was he just a freelance photographer taking pictures in the park?
In the photograph, my grandma is sitting on her side, propped up on her right arm, with her wild black hair blowing away from her face. My mom is posed on her hands and knees, prowling behind my grandma, staring straight into the camera. She looks 21 but my mom is only 14 years old, and my grandma is 34. They look more like sisters.
In less than a few years, my mom’s family will be back in Wisconsin, my grandpa will no longer be a chiropractor, and shortly thereafter, I will be born. My mom will be a mother at 18 years old and my grandma will be a grandmother at 38. I made my mom a grandmother at 37, and my grandmother a great grandmother at 57 – it’s a rare achievement in my family to make it past 20 years old without becoming a parent – but that’s beside the point.
Something happened in Orlando that would forever alter my mom’s relationship with her mother. They both knew it. My mom’s whole family knew it. Her grades plummeted, her attitude changed, she even ran away from home a couple times, and one of the times my mom ran away, something happened to her. Something happened to my mom in Orlando.
My mom won’t tell me what happened, but I think I already know. I remember her once alluding to what happened, back when I was too young to hear such things about my mom, after I heard her screaming about it one of the many nights she fought with my stepdad. Something he did to her had triggered her, decades before I was even aware of that term, decades before it was used as a term of derision lobbed at people who were mocked for being overly sensitive or weak minded. Something my stepdad had done to my mom in their bedroom had triggered her, and she began to scream and cry for help, she began to fight back, while my baby brother and I listened and cried in our bedroom, and the following morning, she told me that she had experienced flashbacks of what happened to her in Orlando.
It wasn’t unlike my mom to share the most intimate details of her life with me, even when I was a child. I distinctly remember her picking me up one time after an otherwise typically pleasant weekend spent with my grandparents, around the same time as that screaming fight with my stepdad. Throughout the first half of my life, I spent a lot of extended weekends with my grandparents, and even occasionally lived with them, until I permanently moved in when I was 16 years old, after my mom divorced my stepdad. I can’t remember if this one particular weekend was before or after her most recent fight with my stepdad, but either would make sense.
I threw my duffel bag into the backseat of our powder blue Ford and turned the radio to the local Top 40 station – Z93. My mom seemed uncharacteristically solemn, so I anticipated that something was out of the ordinary, yet she waited until we were a few miles down the road before revealing her big news.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, and I instantly began to weep. I cried for many selfish reasons, but the only one that really mattered was that I knew that the father of her new baby, my first sister-to-be, was not her husband – my stepdad – and I knew this because it had been less than a couple months since she introduced me to the man she had been sleeping with on the side.
“Why are you telling me?” I said through tears. She confessed that she had no intention to reveal to her husband, or anyone else, the identity of her unborn child’s father, and she expected me to keep it a secret, which I did, until she was ready to tell the truth, four years later, when she became pregnant again by another man who was not her husband.
She could always count on me to keep a secret.
It’s been well over 40 years now, and she won’t talk about what happened in Orlando, but I remember what she had screamed about during that fight with my stepdad, and what she confessed the following morning.
There’s a sense of intimacy and comfort in this photograph from 1974 that I’ve never seen expressed between my mom and grandma, even in their most tender moments, even while they mourned my grandpa’s death, and so I assume that whatever it was that happened to my mom in Orlando, this photograph must’ve been taken before it happened.
“Do you have the original?” I ask my mom, and she says yes. “If you’re willing to send it to me, Katie can try to clean it up,” I offer, but what comes in the mail isn’t the original, it’s a printed copy of the image she sent in a text. I thank her when I receive it, but I ask again about the original copy of the photograph.
The next time I talk to my grandma during our weekly phone call, I mention the photograph from Orlando, and she immediately accuses my mom of stealing it from her. I try to distract her and ask about the company picnic, her job at Robinson’s, my grandpa’s abbreviated career as a chiropractor, and other details about their brief life in Orlando, but now all she wants to talk about is my mom stealing photographs from her photo albums.
“She thinks they’re all just hers for the taking,” my grandma says. “She thinks she’s going to get them all after I die, so she just helps herself.” My grandma doesn’t like to talk about Orlando, and she admits that her and my grandpa’s decision to move there was one of the biggest mistakes of their lives. The only memory she willingly shares is the time a repairman came to her door, and he was a dead ringer for Richard Speck, the man who murdered eight women – all student nurses – in one night in Chicago, my grandma’s hometown, where she met and fell in love with my grandpa while he was a student at The National College of Chiropractic. When she saw the Richard Speck doppelgänger at her door in Orlando, she briefly feared for her life, even though she knew Speck was serving eight consecutive life sentences in prison.
I ask my mom if she took the photograph from my grandma’s photo album, and while she is angry at me, at first, for bringing it up to my grandma, for asking her about the photograph, she eventually admits that’s what she’s done.
“But why didn’t you just ask her first before you took it?” I say, and she excuses her actions by saying that if she did, my grandma would just say no, no questions asked, and this is how she justifies taking it from her. If my mom and grandma are incapable of communicating about something as innocuous as sharing family photographs, I imagine they’re beyond the point of talking about what happened to my mom in Orlando.
“I’d love to see the original photograph, if you can find it,” I say to my mom.
“What’s your obsession with this photograph?” she says in a rapid stream of near illegible voice-to-text messages and claims that neither she nor my grandma have the original. “The photographer had the original,” she says, “and he gave us a copy of that, so why do you care if the one I sent is a copy?” I felt like the conversation was getting lost in semantics but couldn’t think to say anything other than, “because those things matter to me.”
If you have a T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, it matters if you have the original or a reprint, I was thinking to myself, but then I was also thinking to myself, am I really comparing a photograph of my mom and grandma to the T206 Honus Wagner, a baseball card that once sold for over three million dollars?
“If you ever find the original, I would like to see it in person,” I said.
“But you never care about the photos I do send you,” she said.
My mom often mails me stacks of unsolicited copies of family photographs, copies of family photographs I already have copies of, copies of family photographs I gave to her, copies of family photographs I took with my own camera. They arrive in thick envelopes plastered in stamps, so many superfluous stamps, and with my name, and variations on my nickname, and mailing address written all over the envelope. Envelopes decorated with stickers and doodles and hand-drawn hearts and Xs and Os. Envelopes that smelled like patchouli. I imagine the post office must hate my mom’s envelopes.
The photographs inside the envelopes also come adorned with stickers and doodles and notes on the back and often have the corners of the photographs rounded off with scissors, evidence that they were removed from a frame once too small for the photograph. And always, the photographs come with a letter, handwritten in cursive on a sheet of yellow legal pad paper.
My grandparents grew to dread my mom’s yellow legal pad letters, the letters my mom would send when she needed help. My mom was a writer. She only had an audience of two, her mom and dad, but she was a fucking writer. She wrote when the phone bill was overdue. She wrote when her car wouldn’t start. She wrote when she didn’t have money for groceries or school clothes. She wrote when there was another baby on the way. She couldn’t stand to ask for help in person, or over the phone, where she would have to engage in a two-way conversation, and so she would write a letter, where she could soliloquize uninterrupted. And after my grandparents bailed her out, again and again, she wrote a letter to thank them and promise it would never happen again, things would get better soon. But she never wrote to them about what happened to her in Orlando. She never asked for their help with that.
Still, my mom compulsively purchases notebooks, and before she has the chance to fill one, she misplaces it and buys another, and another, and another. The last time my mom needed to move back into my grandparent’s house, she filled their garage with her stuff. My grandma said my mom had boxes full of notebooks, most of them barely used. My grandma told me she was going to rent a dumpster and get my uncle and his sons to help throw all of her “garbage” away, but my mom slowly moved it all out, and into a storage unit, box by box, carload by carload, before she had her way.
“I have so much stuff saved for you,” my mom wrote in her most recent letter to me. My mom’s single bedroom, public housing apartment, and probably at least one storage unit, overflows with every photograph, scrap, and artifact that reminds her of her four children – me, my brother, and my two sisters. This is our inheritance.
Every time my mom sends me something, she wants me to promise I won’t throw it away. She’s saved it all for all of these years, and she wants to ensure it doesn’t end up in the trash, but I’ll admit that a lot of it does. I try to keep as much as possible, but when you indiscriminately save everything, does anything have any value?
My certificate of baptism, inscribed by the priest who was murdered in his own church, arrives in a crumpled plastic grocery bag with baby teeth and clippings from my first haircut and pages torn out of coloring books and a concert ticket stub from the Muppet Babies Live and years of less than stellar report cards and birthday cards and Valentine’s Day cards and Halloween cards and Easter cards.
My mom recently told me she has nearly 40 photo albums to give me, 40 full albums of photographs and miscellaneous ephemera, nearly one photo album for every year of my life, but the one photograph I really want is the photograph of my mom and grandma in Orlando, Florida in 1974, but now she tells me she can’t find it, and my grandma can’t find hers, because my mom took it, and the copy of a copy my mom mailed me is the only copy we have.
Josh Olsen is a librarian, a columnist for SlamWrestling,net, and the co-creator of Gimmick Press, an independent micro publisher of pop culture inspired literature and art. His latest book of micro essays, Things You Never Knew Existed, was published by Roadside Press.