ALAN writes:

My mother was the principal architect of the happiness and warmth and security and serenity that I knew during my boyhood. To say that I owed her a huge debt for all of that would be the understatement of my life.

She saved 45 greeting cards that I gave her in my boyhood years in the 1950s-early’60s. Nine of them were Mother’s Day cards. At some point I must have stopped giving her such cards. Why was that?  Simple: I was an idiot — and more so because I didn’t know I was an idiot.

When I was a boy, I had no idea what a “benevolent sense of life” could be, even though it was right there in front of me every day. It was there in the person of my mother:  In how she lived, acted, and spoke; in her frame of mind and her perspective on life;  in her sense of humor; in what she found funny, what she found beautiful, or what she found repulsive, and why.

I am quite confident she never thought about such things. She was not a philosopher. She was too busy living and discharging the responsibilities that she had assumed or that life handed her. There was no need for me to think about such things when they were the essence of her character.

Her sense of life was like that of uncorrupted children: Children who love life and are alive to its beauty and wonders, but with a grown-up’s ability to differentiate between substance and illusion, between genuine and contrived.

Nor did I know that it was her benevolent sense of life that would inspire her to take photographs of the beauty that nature provides just for the looking or that men and women create when they share that sense of life.

Friends in a young ladies’ sodality took snapshots that show my mother on horseback during outings in the 1930s.

One night in the late 1940s she stood in Tilles Park in St. Louis to take a picture of her older sister’s home across the street.  It shows the front of the house outlined in Christmas lights, and a small tree on the lawn.  Fifty years later, I stood exactly where she did when she took that picture and tried to imagine how it was to be there then, a few years before I was born.  Today the little tree is taller than the house.

A sleet storm in 1956 inspired her to take three color slides of sunlight falling on ice-laden trees the morning after.

Alan, age 8, with his mother in Denison, Texas, 1958.  Photo taken by his Aunt Rose.

She photographed colorful sunsets in Texas in the 1950s, waterfalls and Redwood trees in Yosemite in 1960, and floral gardens in St. Louis, Chicago, California, Florida, New York, and Colorado.  In 1961 she took many color slides at Cypress Gardens in Florida, and I took a picture as she posed with two colorful parrots perched on her arms:

Alan’s mother in Florida, 1961.

She photographed a friend feeding a squirrel in San Francisco in 1960 and me feeding chipmunks at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado in 1964.

Color slides that I took show her standing and shivering in the cold air on top of Mount Evans and Pike’s Peak in the Colorado Rockies in June 1964.

During vacation trips to visit a friend in Southern California in the 1980s, she took color snapshots of gorgeous sunsets and sky scenes.

At home in later years, she photographed ominous-looking storm clouds, a rainbow, and snowdrifts that followed a massive snowfall in St. Louis on a weekend in early 1982.

On a warm day in November 1987, she photographed a tree across from where we lived in south St. Louis because it was dressed in the brilliant pink and orange colors of autumn.

Her benevolent sense of life is what inspired her to find happiness in taking such photographs and sharing them with family and friends.

This year will be the centenary of her birth. But I am glad that she is not here now because this nation today is no place for people as decent as she was. She would be horrified to see what this nation and her city have become.

She lived by the wisdom in the Serenity Prayer, a framed copy of which she kept on a cabinet in her dining room near a pastel sketch of the two of us in profile that an artist made for her in California in 1960.

In an ordinary life that included the usual portions of worry, frustration, and loss, my mother had the ability to see and appreciate the beauty in all the things I named above. She did indeed “look for the silver lining.” It was that intuitive wisdom and her benevolent sense of life that got her through the rough spots along the way.  Those were things I understood and appreciated far too little when I was young, stupid, or distracted, but for which I owed her my eternal gratitude.

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