2/24/2012

Every Photo Tells a Story

Thanks to all who have sent messages of prayer and support around Anne's death.  

At Preludium I have tried mostly to be about public matters, but for these moments I am just a child missing his mother.

Every photo tells a story. Here is one of my mother Anne and me, taken by my father, Ed, for a passport for my mother and me.  Anne was about 26 and I was about 5. It's hard to think anyone could idealize people in a passport photo, but there it is.


4 comments:

  1. The genetics of the Harris line is telling given the cranial size of the 5 year old compared with his mum.

    still amazing is that attribute has carried down the generations....

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  2. Terry Roberts26/2/12 6:53 PM

    I remember the stories you shared about your mother when we were on Executive Council together. What an inspiration. You are in my thoughts and prayers. Terry Roberts

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  3. I'm sorry I haven't commented, Mark, but . . . I just don't know what to say but my prayers are with you, which sounds trite. I remember how devastated I was at my mother's death; it's never any easier with age.

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  4. I've saved this image in my family pictures collection. I've never seen pictures of either of you at so young an age. I look at it and see the beginnings of the Anne I will always have close in my heart. She taught me the most valuable ideas and lessons at intervals of time in my life when I knew there was much to learn and she knew what it was. As a young mother I shared it with my son Robert and in so doing he became the recipient of all that I learned from her. In her mid 40's she was doing a lot of tissue paper collages. She did one of an owl, wooden framed by Ed. It was a gift to our family. It hung in a grouping over our fireplace when we were growing up. If anyone made a proclamation or said something important about the future we wrote it down and put it in a little note "behind the Owl." Later we would just say, "Oh, that needs to go behind the Owl." Mama gave me that Owl when I left home and set up my own housekeeping. And so it continued with Robert who is Matthew's age, living in Cambridge, married, father of 2. He has the Owl hanging in his house and his children know what it means to "put it behind the Owl." Robert loves that Owl because it embodies the precious wisdoms of Anne and all that she conveyed to me. We talked about this when I told him of her passing. How lucky I am to have had her to share with him and to know that he "get's it." This is the way she connected to her family, many who she saw in person only infrequently. She had the ability to connect with her family that way. She claimed us all as important to her. I am happy for this but sad knowing she is gone. But is she really gone when at the same time I think of her and feel the unique enrichment she brought to the life I am still living.

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