Pictures of Mary

In preparation for Mary Lee's service there was a lot of going through of old photo archives, so a number of boxes of photographs were left out on the table at George and Rob's house. As always, when I went through them I admired pictures of the kids and also took note of the ones of George Sr and Mary Lee and also Mary's siblings.

But mostly, of course, I looked for pictures of Mary. Below is one that took me by particular surprise, of Mary and Graham and Sadie at Manor Beach. Graham appears to be 3 so Mary would have been 42, but I swear she looks like a teenager.  Which, to be clear, is not to say she looks old now, but dag does she look young and lovely here. 

All through our lives Mary has chastised me for not taking enough pictures of her, and in some sense the criticism is justified. But in my defense, it is hard to photograph a photographer adequately, since her standards for volume are pretty high. In the digital era, she may well shoot a 20,000-50,000 shots a year.

Moreover, she does not really like having had candids taken, often saying that her hair or outfit isn't really right to be captured for posterity. So the overall message is "take more pictures of me, but not now!" It is a kind of temporal NIMBYism. Also, one of us has to be experiencing the world not through the camera and capturing it verbally on, say, a blog, so it will be there for us (and our kids) in the future.

But I do wish we had more pictures of her, it's true, for me as much as for anyone.