My Mother and the Benevolent Sense of Life
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. (more…)







