Letters to Bizzy:

Painful truth is things for mother didn’t start out as they ended.  Photos of her as a girl reveal a happy carefree child, unfettered by sadness or despair.  Those of her and father when they dated are of a young woman full of life on the verge of a sunny start.  Although pictures can be deceiving, the camera lens has no vested interest.  It only captures those candid images acted out in the real world, sincere or insincere, it is what it is.  I would, therefore, conclude there was a time when mother was content.   

Portraits of thinly veiled disappointments, genesis of which I can only imagine occurred much earlier in her life, become obvious in more contemporary albums; as if life itself weighed heavy, slowly bending and pressing, squeezing what joy existed into tiny memories and ultimately eradicating any previous notion they ever existed.   Pictures at back of the anthology are of faint smiles, the product of an eager photographer cajoling his subject into an artificial pose.  One can only imagine the effort it took to produce such remorseful dissipated snapshots.  We all have memory books to remind of us of where we came from; sadly, the story of mother’s life, and of those she touched, is a progression of things lost along the way.

Please go to Amazon to buy my book: https://amzn.to/3ky4miC