What We See

depends on the lens of the viewer

Time is a wisp of cottonwood seed, drifting through the air on invisible currents that pass right in front of us. A tuft of cottony softness that bobs and weaves, dips and soars, disappearing into the late-summer turf or climbing toward the clouds. How does it float? And what remains with us after each moment passes?

Like the image above, there may be frozen images in sepia toned photographs, and memories, if we're blessed enough to capture them. And what can we see inside our photographed memories?

That depends on the lens of the viewer.

Objectively, we might see a handsome, well groomed and possibly affluent young family from days gone by, a fairy tale. But that's on the surface, visible. What we can't see are the heartaches and hard work it takes to arrive at this moment. Survival struggles giving birth to a future.

And for this single photograph, circa 1957, we can’t see the hair combing, the steaming and ironing of the crisp white linen, or the challenge of tucking three little girls into a vintage baby buggy. And one more thing. There's another little girl in the picture, impossible to identify or even imagine when considering the circumference of my mother's waste line.

It may take hindsight, and a clear eye to see the wealth of tender endearment that drifts through, and eternally connects, these gifted and flawed human beings. My vision has improved over time, enough to imagine the thousands of seedheads, bobbing and weaving, dipping and soaring, leaving their mark and echoing the life and love captured in this single frame. Each a gift I want to remember.

It escapes me now which stores my mother took me to when I needed to find gifts for my sisters. Honestly, I can't picture any stores near the corner of Beverly Drive and Sunset Boulevard. I pilfered change from my father’s bathroom counter to buy candy, excessively, at the Beverly Hills Hotel; but Chapstick, hairspray and Three Musketeers Bars wouldn't do for birthday presents. I seem to remember shopping at Century City at some old-school mall back then where we could go into a department store, and buy something for everyone. My memory may be confused, but I remember clearly that for my birthday, Mama always took me to pick out gifts.

For my sisters. If it was my birthday, I bought them presents.

Because they're not monsters, my parents always bought me a couple of cool gifts, too: one thing I really, really wanted, and a few things I didn't. But my mother was a die-hard for the idea that it's more fun to give than to get. It dawned on me decades later that maybe it was just easier for her to go shopping with one kid instead of three, but I don't really believe that was it. I think she was being intentional. Maybe, when I was eight, I would have wished it was all about me. But I get it now. Everybody wins. Mama wanted to to build community within her family. She spoke of unity like it was the holy grail, the pot at the end of the rainbow. She wanted convivium for everyone in God’s wide world, but especially, she wanted her girls to be close.

My parents told us tales of the first couple of years that they were married, stories of how they scrounged to take care of their small household, just youngsters with their first baby girl, Cherry (short for Cheryl) when they were toughing it out in their late teens. They made their way through that year by living simply, and my father kept his small family afloat by earning a small living as a song leader at a Church of Christ in Denton, Texas.

He planned to be an English teacher, and he started his educational journey with a teacher’s life in mind. My parents’ financial challenges were short-lived as my velvet-toned father began to enter singing contests; he did quite well, gradually morphing into entertainer Pat Boone rather than teacher and music minister, Pat Boone.

When he established his career as a singer, we moved to L.A. where our small gifts at Christmas morphed into taller and taller piles of boxes. The stacks of pristinely-wrapped presents grew so high, we each had our own semi-circular wall of gifts surrounding us. It was an endorphin binge, ripping off paper, squawking and giggling, with my mom oscillating between witnessing and sharing in our pleasure, and compulsively cleaning up all the shreds of paper and putting them in large gardening trash bags, immediately after each gift was opened. We were children then, but even now the memories, those airborne cottony dreams of abundance, still take flight. We grew older, and the Christmas gift-wall grew shorter, but birthdays remained the same. Everybody wins.

My mother was, as all mothers, perhaps, enigmatic in her contradictions. She shopped for bargains and bought duplicates on sale, frugal for a woman living in Beverly Hills with a budget to have housekeepers and gardeners. But she had an extravagant side as well, often organizing vibrant, even celebrity-seasoned parties, always inviting the extended family for holidays, and sometimes, allowing us to have our friends over for pool fun and sleepovers. She wanted to be a giver, but she wanted to be cautious in her spending.

So sometimes, we got socks and underwear in our Christmas stockings; maybe, it made the stockings look more full.

When I married at 22, and we started a family like my parents did, time seemed to be racing ahead of us, making demands and offering little consolation. With a scant household income that was inconsistent, I was fraying on the edges, raising twins and a toddler as an at-home mom. My worried conversations with my mother drifted back to me as offers to send cash to keep us afloat, to help us in hard times; she couldn't have us going without when she was living so comfortably. We fumbled through with odd jobs and very little spending. Once, I spontaneously set up a yard sale on my front lawn aimed at collecting just enough money to fill my beater station wagon up with gas. The struggles my family dealt with tugged on her heart strings, so she always gave me her ear, and if necessary, a few bucks. Christmas became cash gifting, and the occasional plane ticket to arrange a trip home.

I loved her darling, handwritten birthday cards, signed tenderly by both of my parents; in time, she was sending gifts and cards to her grandchildren and eventually, even her great-grandchildren before she passed. In her 70s, she still shopped for her girls in person, going to opulent Beverly Hills boutiques to buy dresses for us; we began to notice that she was aiming at a specific target. Matching outfits. Thinking like the show biz mom she used to be, Mama was hoping to inspire us to dress alike when we on rare occasions performed together, a nostalgic echo of our family performances, and a throwback to when her girls were all on stage in our teens.

It’s blurry, the only pic I found with our full array of colors on display.

She assigned us those colors when we were little, using red, yellow, blue and green stitched-on-thread, all designed to identify which cotton-cropped shirt or summer shorts were whose; I wish I had just one crop-top or dress from my early childhood with that little patch of green thread sewn into the label to honor her conspicuously organizational super-power. Even in our 50s, our mom gave us gifts that were either in our colors, or sometimes, specific collection items she knew we considered special.

As she aged, she couldn’t keep a handle on what our tastes were, but she continued to send sweet and quirky gifts.

• A giant wood and metal Bingo game (complete with a Bingo “blower”) so that we could play family bingo, fancy bingo-cards and all. We have collected Bingo prizes, and do a Bingo Night whenever we can talk anyone into it.

• An Amish style blue and white ceramic serving dish with my name on it, Laury’s Dish, personal and practical. I will always use that one.

• This one unique, crystal bowl had an engraved passage highlighting the homemaking traits of the perennially-perfect Proverbs 31 woman, etched all around the circumference of the bowl. I don't have dinner parties, and I'm afraid that one is gathering dust in an armoire.

Mama blew me away one year when she took the time to gather and send my sisters and I all our own boxes of photographs, photographs I had seen, and some that I hadn't from childhood, teenage years, even before I was born. Candid photos, Polaroids, and professional photos taken when we were singing. That box is a mystery tour wrapped up in cardboard, buried treasure with stories behind each photo, waves of new seeds and remembrances viewed in hindsight through clearer eyes.

With ripples of energy that coursed through her at intervals, up and down like the tide, my mother ran hard, and then stopped, depleted. And she fretted about her health over the years. When I was in my late 30s, she checked into the California based Pritikin Center where she changed her diet completely, eating protein, fruit, grains and vegetables, with lots of garlic and cleansing herbs and supplements, and she walked. She walked a lot. Miles and miles every day on the beach near the center, and when she returned home, she was filled with joy and hope that her life would move in a different rhythm, a healthier one, and that her mitochondria-infused-energy would continue to grow in power and open up opportunities for newfound activities, social engagement, and travel with my father she hadn't enjoyed for years. She wanted to pursue her own ministry, preaching and praying for people relentlessly. She was so good at that.

But Mama suffered from aches and pains that were pervasive, some that were debilitating. There were hospital stays with no clarity, answers or cures. It hurt her to walk, and she couldn’t sleep well which piled on even more chronic aches and pains, and the cycle gripped her by the ankles, pulling her down like gravity onto the easy chair where movement didn't tax her body and heart so much. She lived to love on people through the phone lines. Sometimes, she'd rally and begin to add more physical activity to her life, voraciously taking supplements, and trying all kinds of diets. Her go-to was Jenny Craig.

"I don't know what to do about this weight. I need to get back on Jenny Craig," she'd say when she started to feel heaviness, the weight she had for too long carried…the drain, the puffiness, the relentless drag of a familial and threatening congenital heart disease.

I used to say, “Mama, let's just walk through the living room and the kitchen and back to the den. Just once. Maybe, next week you can do it twice a day. A little bit at a time. Maybe in a couple of months, you can go outside into the yard and walk a little bit. Easy does it, slow and steady. You can make it a ritual.” Of course, my dad did the same.

I had no idea what I was asking of her. She couldn't.

In her final years, she announced that she would be giving us our birthday and Christmas gifts together, and for the last time. She wasn't in hospice, she wasn't at death's door, but she knew. She knew that she had become weary of searching catalogs for the right outfit, the perfect statuette, or piece of jewelry that would cement her lasting love to us after she was gone.

And she had found the perfect gift. She sent each of her daughters a check with specific directions in a short letter. A note, really. She wanted us to buy a cardio focused exercise machine and she wanted us to engage with a routine that would last. To keep us healthy.

“I want you to buy a piece of equipment you'll use, and keep using. I don't want you girls to end up like me." It wasn’t self-deprecating; she was being practical. And those words have had impact.

What we see inside our photographed memories depends on the lens of the viewer.

What I see here is my mother adoring my father and recovering at the hospital in Hackensack, New Jersey, on the day I was born in 1958. She’s wearing the bed jacket that she later gifted to me, at the perfect time, after my own children were born. Another treasure.

I could swear I still feel her gliding through the air on invisible currents that pass right in front of me, a tuft of cottony softness, whispering something to me about the wealth of tender endearment that drifts through, and eternally connects us to each other, her gifted and flawed human beings.