Memory

I am looking at the picture, which I have in front of me. It is a small one, an oval one. Old brass metal frames the woman in the picture gazing kindly out at me. In my early 20’s I took the snapshot of my mother on the beach in Nice, France on a sunny spring day. Nice still retained its quiddity in those days. Perhaps it was already late afternoon.

The warm Mediterranean landscape. The famous Promenade, with some afternoon strollers. The stony beach, empty. My mother is sitting on a rock islet, looking straight at me, smiling into the camera. Behind the brow were happy thoughts, thoughts that had to do with our trip. Whatever went on inside her head had to do with the way she looked, her sun-kissed skin and the faint freckles on her forehead and nose and the cool, sad blue eyes, hiding behind a big pair of sunglasses. Her left arm is on her chin, her light brown hair curled back toward her ears, cut short, not too short, because it was the style. The wind just blew a twist of hair across her face. Her reflection makes me think, makes me count. How old would she be? How would she look? Would she still be elegant, still able to go to the coiffeur each week?

My eyes are fixed on the picture, trying to remember, trying to recollect how she looked on the other days on our trip. I took this color snapshot with my small point-and-shoot camera. I must have taken a whole role of film of pictures on our trip, this is the only picture I have and kept with me and care about. I suppose the rest of the pictures are stored in my basement in Austria. The sad thing is, though, I am unable to recall what we did exactly on this trip. Perhaps, I would not remember anything at all about this trip if I did not have the picture. I imagine her being thrilled when I agreed to go with her to explore Nice and the surrounding Province. After my father’s death, she put all her love, passion, and energy into me, her only child. However, as I crew older, I can remember that I did not want to go with my mother at all on such trips anymore; I wanted to go with my friends to a cool place, somewhere, whatever that meant at the time, I was twenty years old.

Oates says, “Memory is our domestic form of time travel. The photographs, the particular snapshot of revolutionized human consciousness, for when we claim to remember our past we surely remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long faded past is given a distinct visual immortality. Just as art provides answers long before we understand the question, so, too, our relationship with our distant past, in particular our relationship with our parents, is a phenomenon we come to realize only by degrees, as we too age, across the mysterious abyss of time” ( Oates).

I think Oates is so right. When I look at the snapshot of my mother it builds a bridge to this moment in the past. This picture which accompanies me through my essay leads to the past, without the picture I wouldn’t have this particular memory. Memoir has this breathless quality of things unfolding.