The Naked Woman

Here in my parents' house I have found an old photograph. It's a picture of a naked woman, and the woman is my mother.

Now wait.

I put the photo in an old frame and hung it on my bedroom wall where it is sure to get somebody riled up sooner or later. (It did!) I hope that I will enjoy that moment. (I did, Gail!) It may help me end a relationship that should end, one of the many I shouldn't have started.

My father was a photo journalist and did “art” photography as a hobby, so in 1939 or ‘40 he did what any amateur art photographer would want to do if he was in love with his wife: he took naked pictures of her. My mother may or may not have been reluctant, I'll never know in this life, but as a model I'm sure she was cheap.

It's a tasteful picture: one sees only her back, her rear, and a little peek of breast as she sits turned away from the camera with her arms around her knees. Her ass is covered (artfully, I suppose) with some patterned material such as a shawl or a large kerchief.

My brother and sister tell me that there are other pictures like this still to be found, but we’ve yet to locate them. We will. However, I do remember once, long ago, coming across one of my mother seated while extending an apple towards the camera. Her upraised arm obscured her breast, which she would lose years later. (And later still, her ability to even hold an apple would be gone.) And they tell me also that there is another in which she is posed holding a smoking gun. Oh Dad, how you toyed with wickedness then, in your little house so far removed from the true horror of a world war. And I write this on a cool 1997 night, lounging on my back steps with a drink, a pen and some paper, and a pistol in my lap. Such a full lap; no room for kids. Dad, some of the neighborhoods around the house have gone to hell for the most part. It was never very peaceful that I can recall, but now there are more people in there who don’t care whether they live or die, much less whether I live or die.

But the point of this fractured thing is this: My mother loved being alive, and that's because she was loved as a child, and so in turn was I. This love explains why she loved life. She even loved me, ungrateful whining chitinous cretinous little shit that I was, and because of this unconditional love, I turned out pretty much okay. What problems I may have are not her fault. I was raised last, and my parents’ childrearing mistakes were committed upon my brother and sister before me. I'm one of the lucky ones in the world because of that, and also because my parents were very much in love throughout their entire marriage. Even through the inevitable rocky times, and until death did them part. Their generation couldn’t avoid some ignorance, of course, and they passed it on to us, but what the hell, they also accidentally gave us the ability to grow up and deal with that. One could argue that this is the immediate purpose of love.

But the unloved, well ... Dan Quayle and I certainly have little else in common, but we both believe that it's the unloved who are screwing up a lot of our neighborhoods. (And then there are those too cool for love, or in love with their own damage, but that's another story.) They are screwing up entire nations and then an entire planet. Perhaps unloved creatures from other planets are tinkering with their superior technology in order to speed up the Second Law of Thermodynamics, thereby setting into motion the destruction of the entire universe in a giant, backwards bang of friction and heat. They are unloved, they don't want to be alive, and they are going to take us down with them. Hey, if you ever read comic books as a youngster, did you get the impression that the evil villains were loved by their mothers? Well, maybe that doesn't count here, because comic books believe in pure evil as the larger cause of villainy, which holds more drama as a pissant literary device and allows great speeches backed by howling winds. But I don't believe in pure evil. Purely evil acts, yes. And confusion, ignorance, fear, too-cool worldviews, Hollywood propaganda, demons and bad crack.

Whatever. So thanks, Mom, I love being alive. I hope I die before I get sent to a nursing home (“be nice to your children, they will choose it for you”), but meanwhile I'm a constantly irritated but happy guy, and there just aren't enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do in life. Not enough time to work on music, something that my parents never discouraged me from doing, though I often wish they had. Not enough time to study French or whatever, to read whatever, to drink with people who may be friends or not, no matter. Not enough time to chat with the ladies at the convenience stores who call me Honey. Not enough time to write letters to my dear friends who forgave me everything in advance.

Sleep is an annoyance. But waking up is a blast. Tomorrow I just know that I'll crawl out of bed uttering every vowel sound from several alphabets as my bones clank into place, and I'll look at that picture on the wall and I`ll say, "Hey Mom, you're naked."