growing up, it never appeared strange to me why we hardly had photos lying around.
no frames groaning on walls easily sopped by temperamental monsoon rains. no clear plastic albums studiously left open on coffee table tops cloaked with crocheted doilies.
maybe, we were just an ugly family too self conscious to be photographed. maybe, we were just a fidgety family too ill at ease for static poses.
i remember a few. mother, in a traditional terno, doing a stiff jota de manilena sway balance during an all teacher dance presentation in a long forgotten school convocation. there was one with mother and i, both unsmiling, in our sunday’s best, walking a mile a minute away from a blurred building.
and there was that one with me with what could pass for a smile on my face.
oddly, i was still in the center of a lichened rock garden. not running, not restless, but adult still and gazing right back intently at the camera.
the overwhelming presence of my mother behind the instamatic camera is not palpable within the frame of the picture. it only had me, grinning, you could say, at this strange exercise, this unusual-for-our-family enterprise of standing still for a moment and being coerced to come up with strange facial contortions.
yesterday, my mother left a message on my answering machine. her voice still badgering, she asked me why haven'’t i called her for the past two months now.
i don'’t know either. all i seem to know is that it seems unnatural for me to call her and be constrained to talk about things that needed to be said in stillness, in tranquil silence, like touching, tangentially at best, about her troubles with her philandering husband.
in that photo, my knees were scraped although not bleeding. my olive khaki bermudas were frayed at the hems. and i was clutching in my right hand a clump of caramelized corn puffs.
i remember now where that was taken. it was on an abandoned student garden project behind the school where mama taught. for most part of the school year, the deserted rock garden was where young lovers escape to after school hours.
waiting for mama to wind up all her activities every school day afternoons, i used to sneak behind the clapboarded school building and into the garden blossoming with a strange bouquet of kissing and sometimes fighting couples. and i would hide behind a flaming red bush- that is how i remember it - on my knees and trying to suppress my giggles.
mother doesn’'t teach there anymore. and i believe sitting on that patch of land is a covered basketball court with a more knee friendly wooden parquet flooring.
a saner friend of mine once said that my memory always engages in this sophistry, deliberately twisting to my current world views everything that happened to me during my childhood. he could be right.
but memory, at least mine, is never a fence sitter. it always has these final judgments. and it always sees what was before unseen.
i see my mama now taking my picture in the garden, crisp in her pantsuit school uniform, making ends and tails with this shiny sparkling camera, wishing for a kid not easily agitated by the crazy goings on around of love and loss.