Looking at Old Photographs

Like puppets, the trees peek out over the roof of the nursing home—it’s Sesame Street for the sky, the sun’s early morning TV. Or maybe the wind is learning sign language, finger-spelling some foreign word or my mother’s maiden name, which after thirty years of marriage, she re-affixed to everything. It appears on the door to her room and will soon appear on a stone: Sheila Ellen King.

I’m trying to lighten the mood with old photographs, which she finds a bit rosy for the occasion. She’d rather mourn what might have been. As Lillian Hellman once wrote, “I’m too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.” And so, today we’ll rake the leaves of regret; perhaps tomorrow we can jump in them.

How do we not become children again at the end of our lives? Once, when I was six, on an errand for Sister Margaret, I ran into my mother in downtown Philadelphia. At first, she was flabbergasted. It was as if we’d found each other, panicked, in an amusement park. Then she was furious: “No child should walk unaccompanied through this neighborhood.” Sister Margaret, who would later have Alzheimer’s and become, in the words of a loathsome priest, “uninhabitable,” explained that I was the only student she could trust to bring back the change. Now I’m the one lecturing staff about leaving my girl unattended.

Soon, my mother says, she’ll roam the shores of Purgatory (where everyone, I imagine, is speechless). “It will be centuries before heaven lets me in. Don’t wait for the old bag.”

        “My time will be longer than yours,” I assure her, though I haven’t an ounce of faith.

        “No, you went after your life, and so you get another one,” she says.

In the end, everything turns to memory, that final courier, though it’s so much less reliable than a boy who believed in honest math and whose hands were full of silver.

Ralph James Savarese | Oh, Jason
Contents | Mudlark No. 82 (2025)