So this morning, I wasn't in the best of moods...until my good friend Amy shared with me an email she received from her professor.
In the off chance that you are also having a bad morning, or could just use a pick me up...read this:
Like a lot of people in my generation, I was raised by my grandmother. My father, who worked in the woods his whole life, crawled down into the bottom of a bottle and never came back. My mother took in wash until one day she simply vanished. I used to tell my childhood friends my mother had met a dark, brooding mysterious man, rumored to be a prince from a far away land, and she had gone off with him to help raise his children after his wife had been killed in a terrible accident while riding her wild and untamed stallion whose flesh was blacker than midnight.
Miman, which is what I called my grandmother, was barely literate, but she loved me deeply and was determined to raise a good man, unlike, as she would say with a hiss, “That pickled spawn of Satan, your father.”
Now, looking back on it, I realize what a fantasy world I constructed for myself. Our shack had not really been a castle. My hand-sewn clothes had not really been royal robes. Our meager soup had not really been feasts fit for noblemen. But I was happy in my childhood ignorance.
I never knew that Mima saved every dime, every penny she earned. How would I know, I was a child.
Then, when I was 17 and about to join the military, seemingly the only way out of my poverty, Mima pulled me aside and spoke softly. “I have something for you, Danny,” she said in that voice that to me always sounded like the breath of cool wind coming off the Cascades and down through our neighbor’s apple orchard. She opened the lid of a rusty metal box, and inside, in neat stacks, I saw what must have been hundreds of twenty dollar bills. I was speechless.
“You are going to college, Danny,” Mima whispered. “You will someday be a great man.”
Even now it is difficult to admit how much I cried that day. Cried for the love of Mima, cried for the overwhelming feeling that there was, after all, true goodness in the world.
Happiness, of course, is an illusion. And in my sophomore year of college I received a letter from our neighbor telling me I must return home immediately. Mima was dying of tuberculosis.
At her bedside, I was overcome with grief.”Why Miman?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have dropped out of school, gotten a job and we could have gotten you a doctor.”
“No, Danny,” Mima smiled. “No, no. You must continue to study. You must be someone someday. You could even be professor someday, Danny.” This, to me, was unimaginable.
Before me, laying in her small bed with covers sewn from old flour sacks, the only kindness I had ever known was dying. I cursed the gods that day, cursed all that was holy.
Mima’s eyes closed and I feared she had passed. Then, suddenly, she opened her eyes and looked and me with a serene smile. “I have something for you Danny, “ she said.
What more could she possibly give me, I thought. She had already given me my life and an opportunity to succeed.
“Come close, Danny,” she whispered.
She pulled out a long narrow box. I could not imagine what was in it. Opening it with shaking fingers I saw it was a silver Bogen tripod. “Miman!” I exclaimed. “A tripod!”
“Yes Danny. Go become a photojournalist.”
Those were the last words she ever spoke, but I believe she died happy knowing someday I could shoot video that would not shake.
And now, sadly, I can’t remember to whom I loaned that silver tripod.
So if you have it, can you please return it to me?
For Mima’s sake?
(not the small one I loaned you, Abby)
Thanks,
Dan
