Family photos are exercises in excess inward meditations upon everyday activities, objects, and familial others. Most are plain to understand and still hard to decipher completely. A melange of birthdays, graduations, holidays, and other ritualized special events are the normal foci as are kids. Yes, kids. Lots of kids get their picture taken, that is, until parents lose interest in memorializing every baby sputum, shit, piss, bath, step, word, nap, meal.
This picture stands out if only because it offers us a snapshot of a trailer park in Belleville, Illinois in October 1978. The trailer is that of Mildred Zimmerman. The car is hers as well, a powder blue Chevy Nova. My mother and her aunt would eventually take that car and this trailer away from her as dementia slowly took her away. I faintly remember riding around the house on a broomstick horse with my great-grandmother Zimmerman in the kitchen and Prince playing on MTV in the front room. This was some time around 1982. I was five. Back then photomats were near-ubiquitous, small drive-up locations in grocery store parking lots. We had one in the Supervalu parking lot at Saint Louis Road and Main Street in the adjacent town of Collinsville. It would close some time in 1987 because the millions of photos that I took while vacationing with my mother's grandparents in Arizona were never picked up after being dropped off. I hounded my mom about her not getting them, but this would be one of many themes in my somewhat unorthodox childhood relationship with her. What other mother would ask you to help reattach a pull string to a ceiling fan, hold your hips as you stood on the edge of the water bed, and perform a hasty reach around on your pubescent penis while your neighbor friend Joey stood witness in the doorway to the room? Not many moms would. Mine did. Rape? Nah. Molestation? Maybe. Let's focus on the photograph instead. I didn't need therapy. I needed a finish.
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