My Mom, Dreaming of Elsewhere

(Or, Playing with Photos # 1!)

My parents, Anne O’Quinn Crockett and Jerry Bruce Crockett, are genuinely extraordinary people. As an adult, now 47, I can see that now more fully and clearly than ever before. They are both, thank God, in very good health despite some challenges, and in their late 70’s still throw one hell of a great dinner party. Essential facts: they are deeply and most unusually still in love after 54 years of marriage. Their daily experience– pleasure, struggle, all of it, is informed by a real faith (by which I mean one that opens one’s world and tends to include, rather than making it smaller, inviting a sort of calcification of the soul in which dogma takes center stage, no matter the human cost). And, they are all about family. Always have been.

I don’t want to go Norman Rockwell on you, because nothing in real life is ever really all that easy or simple, I know. I’m not about painting a pretty picture that reflects more fantasy than fact, leaving others feeling “less than” because their reality doesn’t live up to a perceived ideal.

And besides, all of that is another story. Today I just wanted to share with you an old photograph, the way it hit me, and the image birthed as a result.

This I will do with no more words, other than to explain that above is my maternal grandmother, Flora Frye O’Quinn (a huge soul if ever there was one), my Mom, and her sister Pat at their home in Lillington, NC. Gammy had sewn for her daughters dresses made of silk, and the photograph marks the occasion.

I was immediately struck by the photo, especially my Mom. Just look at her! I thought, “Where is she?” It got me to thinking, and wondering.

Here is where that wondering led me.

My Mom, dreaming of elsewhere.