CuppaGemma

It was spring. Some things would end and others begin. Snow sprinkled the morning like confetti for a new year. And the night before the fire had crackled with the warm purr of embers nestling embers. The light of the night, the light of the stars, the light in their eyes held a little harmony till the sun tumbled out the wet happy flurries in the morning. Because all beginnings start with darkness.

The emptiness as large as Ontario was gone- the hollow that had weighed down the air and filled it with immobile grey had lifted as though the sea were rollers and delivered it away. Even the quiet seemed to have a contented little rhythm. Such as never.

From the front lines of mothering,

“Mom, question.”

My twelve year old, Thomas prefaces his queries this way. He is a logical and practical thinker who prefers to get right to the point with all matters. Especially important ones. I need to do this, where can I find that and what if I were to…I can take this apart right?

I turned away from the computer, “Yes?”

“I can’t find my conviction. Where is my conviction?”

I pushed my chair back and turned 90 degrees. He is a spunky and determined kid. Proud to ride his bike for miles, do small repairs around the house, ring lead with his buddies to go fishing. He knows he wants to work with his hands. He has a strong conversational style and is relentlessly creative.

My puzzled look confused him so he repeated the question.

“My conviction, where is it? I can’t find it!”

“How can you lose your conviction?”

“I don’t know. I lost it, where is it, have you seen it? I need it.”

“Seen it, how can I see your conviction?”

“The can Mom, the can of conviction?”

“You have a can of conviction?”

“Of course I have a can of conviction, it’s the best kind you can get, where is it?”

“How do you get a can of conviction?”

“Mom, you buy it at Duane Reade.”

“Conviction? You buy conviction at the drugstore?”

“Well they don’t sell it at the butcher. Where is it?”

“How do you buy conviction, it’s not a thing, do you know what conviction means?”

At this point my younger son Ryan, age nine pipes in, “It means the judge puts you in jail?”

“Ok guys, conviction do you know what the word means?”

“Getting in trouble?”

“No, conviction is when you believe in something so strongly, it can’t be changed.”

“Fine, whatever. But mom I lost my only can of conviction spray. Where is that?”

Ah, so conviction is now a scent to be marketed and worn by young men. I had cringing memories of the smell of Drakkar cologne and high school boys. Fleeting shivers of fear as thoughts of acqua net hair spray and disco music montages skimmed past my eyes. This too shall pass. Quickly, I hope. And mom is more of a “noob” than she supposed.

“Thomas I have no idea, where did you last use it?”

“If I remembered that, I wouldn’t be asking you.”

“Exactly why do you need to use conviction?”

“It makes me smell the best I can get.”

“And the reason why you need to smell the best you can get would be?”

“Conviction mom, it’s my conviction. I gotta find it.”

From the Economist, “The extra cent a pound is the first pay increase workers have received in 30 years. Even with it, a picker would have to fill 15 32-pound buckets an hour to earn Florida’s minimum wage of $6.79.”

Seasonal workers don’t make much. And is three decades is a rather long time to not have any increase to adjust for inflation.

Dorothea Lange’s photo of a migrant mother in Nippomo California made a difference to a lot of people. For more history you can read here.

Maybe it needs to be spiffed up and re-released? But what affect would it have on people today?

This is what Lange said of the experience, “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. “(From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

In our age of content deluge, we are numb to images and tired of hearing hardship. Still, tell me the value of a penny.