What’s Your One Shot?
My Mom would have been 109 years old this month. That’s kind of a meaningless claim, I guess, uttered by Boomers everywhere these days on Facebook and in email postscripts.
It’s just an attempt to harness mortality and feel better about the inevitable cycle of life.
The thing is that although I have dozens of pictures of my mother, from early childhood on, there is one shot that says everything to me about what she did, what she cared about, and how she forged ahead in the face of mind-numbing odds.
You know that picture, right? It’s the one you’d have stuck to your dashboard if you were hurtling toward the Death Star or becalmed for days without water in the Sargasso Sea.
It’s the One Shot.
The One Shot is a photo that shows your loved one in a special way; maybe a way that only resonates with you. It could be a spouse, a child, or a friend that promised to always have your back. It’s by fire light, or lamp light, or under a brilliant sun in a garden. It happened in a moment and it told everything about them that mattered.
It’s there. Hung on the refrigerator or stuck in the mirror or sitting in a frame on the mantle.
The One Shot of my mother is a split second of her life when her past and future came together for me. It’s not a spectacular photo, but it’s the first one that comes to mind when I think of her, and the one that touches everything her life — and ours — was about.
Mom grew up as one of four children on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington State, where my grandparents owned a summer lodge. The kids learned to make their own fun when they weren’t serving or entertaining guests. They spent long days on the beach and in the water just pretending to be explorers or pirates — and only a few miles, as it happened, from where I took the One Shot. There’s a comfort, a familiarity about her at the rowboat that speaks to a life of self-sufficiency, purpose, and curiosity.
And then there’s the white sweater.
Mom was not stylish, but she always cared about her appearance. I think it was because of her family’s business, and always being in front of the public. She looked sharp and put together every day. Even when alone at home, you could never catch her in sloppy clothes or curlers. Gardening, cleaning, cooking, it didn’t matter.
The white sweater was the litmus test and she wore it constantly as if deliberately courting disaster. But in all those years, I don’t ever recall so much as a spot on it. She could be cleaning fish, painting furniture, emptying a vacuum cleaner bag; nothing touched it. Maybe she had a closet full of white sweaters, I don’t know, but I think it was just her own private joke to a messy world.
But it’s the little bow wave that gets me every time. Pushing the sea out of her way. Always moving forward.
My father died suddenly when Mom was 52. We were 4 years into a new town; known to everyone but not really close as far as I knew. I was 14.
After the initial shock, Mom found a nice job at the high school managing the media lab and proceeded to build it up into a district-wide media resource. She sold the house my dad built and had a smaller one built for us with a nice garden.
She forged on.
My One Shot of Mom reminds me of all that. She’s out there on the water in a place that she loved all her life. She was the ultimate self-starter, full of curiosity and driven by purpose. Plus, she did it with a little style.
And, as it happens, there’s a little bit of me in the picture as well. When Dad passed away I started using his cherished Nikon F camera and lenses which ignited my passion for photography. This shot was one of the early ones that started me on my own life journey too.
So that’s my One Shot.
What’s Yours?
