Life's Little Gems

A while back I was at my Mom's house helping her clean out one of her closets when we came across a shoebox full of old pictures. I remember feeling as if we had struck gold. Old family photographs are a real treasure as they are brief little glimpses of better days and simpler times.

It amazes me how you can find an old picture you have never seen and just then you remember the exact moment it was taken. They are like little memory enzymes that set a nostalgic trip in motion. Look at me in that rumbero outfit. Man was I skinny. That's from when I danced Eneida's Fifteens....I had the biggest crush on her....

In the shoebox were photographs of family get-togethers, vacation pictures from when we all went on a cruise, pictures of Mom and Dad in their youth, sitting at some big table in a ballroom somewhere and dressed to the nines. Mom and I sat there for at least an hour going through tose pictures, telling a story with each one. It was really a special moment, for the both of us, as we shared memories of the lives we have shared.

There was one set of pictures that I remember really blew me away. Black and white photographs I had taken back when I had photography as a hobby, albeit a brief one. The pictures were mostly of my Mom and my youngest nice Maura, taken on sunny day when she was about two or three in my mom's back yard. We had both completely forgotten about those black and whites but the minute we saw them we both remembered the day so vividly. Mom fought back the tears and once I saw her well up I began to well up too.

The pictures were taken in my mom's garden, on a day were she was baby sitting Maura and I wasnt out messing around with friends or working or studying. They were beautiful too. Maura dancing in the yard with my mom's flower garden in the background, or the picture of my mom holding her granddaughter, both profoundly happy in the eyes.

But there was one picture in particular that struck me so beautiful, so pure that I told mom I was gonna keep to get it enlarged. It was of Maura lying on the grass, holding her head up with her little arm with a huge Hibiscus flower in her ear. She looks so damn adorable in that photograph, in her eyes nothing but the love of a child, untainted and untouched by the realities of life.

Once I had the photo enlarged I had to find the perfect frame for it. I was not going to put that perfect photograph in a cheap Kmart frame. I also didn have the money at the time to have it framed so the search for the perfect frame began.

I remember I went everywhere looking for that frame. Stores, malls, frame shops, art supply stores, garage sales. No frame seem to fit the photograph perfectly and the very few that did were way too expensive. The frame search went on for weeks, until, one day, I pulled the envelope with the photograph in it out of my briefcase and set it on a shelf. At the time I was working full time and attending classes at the University simultaneously and had little if any time to continue the search. So the photograph stood there on my shelf, in it's envelope, between a first edition of Robert Frost's West Running Brook and an old English Lit anthology book for months.

While I was having lunch one day at the office, my mom called and asked, out of the blue, about the photograph and the frame. I told her I had had to give up on finding the frame as I didnt have the time and that I had then completely forgotten about it. I could tell Mom was disappointed, so I promised her I would try to find a frame for it as soon as possible.

That same day I went outside of the office to have my mid-afternoon cigarette, it must have been about 2:30 as the kids from the elementary school across from the office were getting picked up. One of the cars parked across the street had a flat tire and I remember thinking Poor mom! Comes to pick up her kid and now has to change a flat. I decided to wait in case I could give her a hand.

A few minutes later, after most of the other cars had gone with their children safely tucked in their back seats, there's this little white haired old man with a little girl in tow, both walking slowly towards the car. He opened the passenger rear door, set her into the kid seat and then started to walk around the back of the car towards the driver side until he saw the flat.

The old man walked back to the trunk, opened it, and started taking out boxes and other things until he managed to pull out the big jack. By then I was already undoing my tie and unbottoning my shirt because I knew I wasn't going to let that old man change the tire by himself.

I walked up to him, introduced myself and told him I worked across the street and that I would be happy to change the tire for him. He looked up at me both happy and a little sad, I guess, because maybe he knew he was at the point in his life where he couldnt change a tire.

I changed his tire for him in about 3 minutes and hardly broke a sweat. I put the old tire in the trunk along with the jack and the boxes he had taken out. I told him to drive carefully and reminded him to make sure he had his tire fixed. We shook hands and I started back to the office. Right when I was in the middle of the street, I heard him call out "Muchachon! Come here."

I turned around just in time to see him take out his wallet and fumble through it. "No no. Señor," I told him. "I can't take your money." He insisted, I insisted more.

"Ok," he said. "Wait a minute." He walked back to the trunk and opened it then called me over.

I was reluctant and as I neared the trunk I realized he wanted to give me something for my troubles and right when I was about to tell him that I wasn't going to accept anything, from one of the boxes he pulled out the perfect picture frame.

Life gives us little gems, we just have to know how to appreciate them.

Posted by Val Prieto at November 25, 2003 02:58 PM

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Posted by: Da Goddess at November 28, 2003 04:29 AM