Family photos

Photographs of many generations of our families fill a wall in our family room. As a former history teacher, I love imagining the explosion of the bulb when my great-grandfather, Wescott, a lumberjack in northern Wisconsin, posed for the picture with two unnamed men ... or my grandmother with her eight sisters, one generation removed from Sweden. Further along the wall, Rachel, her brother, and their parents are gathered circa 1968, singing in a park somewhere in London, which sits next to an uninspiringly posed photo of my brother, sister, and me leaning on a birch tree in our Concord, Mass., backyard. We have many pictures of our children at various stages of life and one elegant one of my mother on her wedding day.

My mother was a fiercely independent daughter of a small-town banker and an equally independent mother. She grew up on a farm with her brother, older by seven years, and her parents in Wasco, Ill., somewhat isolated from her classmates. All of that time by herself led her to become a voracious reader who eventually found her way to the University of Michigan at a time when few women from rural Illinois left home to go to college, let alone move out of state. While she came from a privileged background, I sensed that she had often been underestimated as the younger sister, as a woman, and eventually as the wife of a doctor. A secretary and a blazing fast typist when she met my father on a blind date, she became a teacher and later an antiquarian bookstore owner.

My mother had a broad sense of honor and integrity. She recoiled when gossip seeped into a conversation and admonished us when we repeated something that was unkind. My mother wasn’t a saint — she could be tough and didn’t suffer fools gladly — but she rarely spoke ill of others. One of the most important lessons she taught was to always stick up for our classmates who were picked on or ignored. A bystander she was not.

My mother passed away over 25 years ago. I often wonder what she would have to say about the world we live in today. The reader in her would be troubled by the sound bites that pass themselves off as news and the tweets used to dismiss complex ideas. Most of all, she would abhor the social media echo chamber that can fuel self-righteousness and make it easier to be unkind. As a mother and a teacher, she would remind me of the importance of modeling what it means to be a positive member of a community.

The photos of five generations of Brackers, Countrymans, Berglands, Wescotts, and Cannadys remind me that a) no one smiled in pictures until the mid-20th century, and b) we aren’t in this alone, nor should anyone feel so. Happy Mother’s Day!

JWB