WE’LL TAKE A CUP OF KINDNESS YET

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT’S A TIME OF LIFE FOR DECIDING WHAT TO KEEP, and what to leave behind. Photographers, as well as people in general, reach an age when lists must be made. The essentials versus the disposable. The legacies versus the litter. We know we can’t take it with us when we go, but now things are getting serious, and so we can’t even take everything with us as we, say, move across town. Boxes are searched: offers are made. Do you want this? If so, take it. If not…

A year ago, this mug would never have made it into the keeper pile. I have often forgotten, over the years, that I even owned it, as it was one of those awkward gifts that an adult child gets from his aging mother simply because she has already bought him everything he actually wanted over a lifetime, and, oh, hell, here comes another Occasion. It’s kitschy and not my taste and was never on my radar as an object of desire. But a year ago, my mother was still alive, and so, now, it’s something quite different.

Now, the mug is bound up in things bigger than itself, having become a reminder that she loved that I loved that we were Irish. I was the one in my generation who “got it”, who thought that remembering our family’s journey from the Great Famine of the 1840’s to the present day was important, even an obsession, and so she wished up a token of that pride and sent it to me. I thought of you when I saw this.

And so, at this point, I make pictures of the mug, in an attempt to show a bit of the feelings that shape it in my mind beyond its mere physical reality. To interpret it as an aspiration, a remembrance, a ghostly vapor. Because my mother’s passing has not rendered the actual object any more valuable or artistic of and by itself. I am really taking pictures of myself from the inside out and draping that photographic veil onto the mug. In future, as the lists of keep/toss candidates pile higher and higher, the actual cup might well be left behind, but now that’s all right. In a photograph, I can continue to have something after I no longer possess it. That’s the miracle of a camera, and the best way to remember a woman who believed in, and often brought about, miracles of her own.