And of course the bouquet-toss. I love my mom's expression, the way she's holding her arm, the way the sleeve of her dress defines her arm and her hand, the bouquet moving on some weird trajectory, the young girl with the bandaid on her finger facing the camera, the expressions on all the women, their thick legs, their glasses, and all the unseen others watching.
There were so many others I liked that I didn't scan, my mother on my grandfather's arm; the groom and bride kissing; the groom removing the bride's garter; my aunt and the bridal party; home after the wedding, only the family now, eating, people standing around the table, pirogi and blintzes visible among the dishes; my uncle, now dead, throwing rice as my dad and mom leave, my dad hunching his shoulders a little against the incoming grains. It was a November wedding, the ceremony--probably Polish Catholic--in the late morning or early afternoon with a long lunch reception, food and drink and polka, surely dancing; and then dinner later, mostly family and close friends, probably at the house my grandfather built, the house my mother grew up in, the house that my uncle eventually moved into and raised his five kids in, my grandfather then down the road in another house they built.
Prom date photos. Photos of her her first boyfriend, though crush might be a more accurate way to describe them; she wasn't allowed to date. Photos from her first trip on a plane, to Chicago as a science fair winner, the only woman. Photos from a grad school party in California. Slides of Sydney and my uncles and aunts and grandfather. Iowa City in the 70s, my brother or me licking cake batter off a spoon. And on and on, until the crisp black and whites and colored square photos give way to washed out and chemically deteriorating kodaks from the late 70s, pictures of Kansas City days faded now to the colors of autumn, and running at some point over the divorce. There are a couple of me and my brother, our arms around each other that I place at this time. 1979, the year I had lice, the year I broke my arm wondering if I could just let go of the monkey bars and break it, the year I got glasses, and everything sort of spun off into leavings and desertions and we were gone, the faded earthtones replaced now by the hard kodachrome blues of western skies and the blaze of sun on granite and us among all that geology wearing the transitional styles of the early 80s, willingly it appears, however improbable it all may seem now.
Or some such story without a narrative, half made up and misremembered but true: what happened to us.
My mother is strange now. She moves strangely, is in a kind of constant motion that's distracting to watch. She bobs and nods her head when she talks, her motions take on a gestural extravagance, a fluidity that extends beyond intent, unbounded. It's dyskinesia, Colin and Danielle tell me, a side effect of the dopamine agonists she takes for the Parkinson's; so much energy that may be explained by the fact that some of the drugs metabolize into amphetamine. We talk about it upstairs, talking until three in the morning, while she's asleep. Uncertain whether she's overmedicated or this is just how it's going to be from now on--for it is new, different than the Parkinsonian stiffness she's had for ten years now--whether this is the price of her feeling free. Danielle cautions him--because if it is the price and there's nothing to be done, then why bring attention to it...--and they bicker as they do, in their beautiful way. But when it does come up, when my mom in fact brings it up, an opening at dinner full of sad awareness, he handles it beautifully, his assurance washing over all of us. He's running this family now with his ability to talk medicine and the anchor that his relationship with Danielle provides, the brightness of the two of them. (Even though he's killing my dad in his remoteness, neglected emails and phone calls, which somehow my mom and I aren't bothered by at all but which has my father jumping to conclusions and making threats.)
Me, I'm more lost, unmoored on my internal sea some days, saying little, distracted and probably perceived as aloof. Poring over photo albums, insisting on scanning the photos; I think my brother seemed suspicious, thought, perhaps, my interest in all this history and all these old moments was a form of nostalgia that was obliterating them, here, now, before me, still alive. (But it wasn't all like this, Ian out on some internal sea. There are elisions here, of course.) Watching myself watch her making turkey sandwiches for us to take back on the plane; watching all the extra embellished motion of making sandwiches; watching myself not help because helping seems a kind of taking away from, a diminishment of, what she is giving; watching my brother come in and help. And realizing I was confusing doing with with doing for. So I get up to help too. When I have my arm around her in the kitchen it's like she's dancing, moving to some inaudible music and the whole thing makes me sad, the motion and the distance and all her fragility that's so evident here before her and just isn't there at all over the phone; how far we both have to travel to see her, how much use we could be closer. Flying back, leaning into the window and beyond myself in tiredness, on my way to this land of light and space that's beautiful but somehow inhuman, back to all this emptiness, I think to myself, this can't go on. But it can, of course, which only makes it worse.
But that's not all, it's not all sad. So with my arm around her, feeling how small she is though she's not all that small, I'm really happy to be there with her. All this history is nothing, really, and everything; we're bound together in the bruises we caused each other, the ways we failed each other and the ways we didn't, our unbroken and unconditional love through all of what happened to us and happens still, the slow erosions of time, of possibilities, the sharing of what we've found and what we have come to know, how we made each other laugh. Family, what a fucking racket. Sometimes I feel there isn't anything else. I tighten the hug and pull her into me.
Look at these photographs of her years earlier and you can see what time does, its crush and press that only goes on and on and on until it stops. But that's not what I want you to see. That's not what I think you see. There's such life in her face, and strength, and the omnipresent barrette sort of cracks me up and a thousand other things I can't really articulate even if I were to go on for pages about them, inarticulately, as seems to be my curse. Or yours that I've chosen you to listen.