Groucho Moky

Last fall, I couldn't find my passport. And it was really eating at me, because it was expired and I wanted to get a new one, and get one for the girlie. You know, just in case we need to flee the country or something. Eventually it turned up, but then I started wondering where my social security card was, since those kinds of documents usually stick together. I knew I had one - the original one that I'd gotten in high school - but it was nowhere to be found.

I've spent most of the past two weeks away from home, mostly at my mother's house. In between bouts of incompetent nursing, my sister and I engaged in some aimless archeology (and surreptitious updating of one another's Facebook statuses).

Lo and behold, in a box of random treasures, I found my social security card. It was in one of those plastic card/photo holders that slips into a wallet, though the wallet is no longer around. The only other thing in the photo holder was the only picture of a family member that I can ever remember having carried around with me. These days, I've a handful of pictures of the girlie on my phone, and a couple tacked up around my desk, but I've never been the sentimental type that carries photos.

I have no idea when this picture was taken, or where. I don't recognize the house. But it's my mother. I love the ginchy hands, and the way she looks so happy under her Groucho glasses and the family wig.

When I slipped the picture out of its sleeve, it delaminated. It's an old Polaroid, and it had been cut to fit in the sleeve.  I quickly (and crookedly) scanned it and stuck it back in the sleeve.  You can see how the surface layer is cracked - from age, from being sat upon.  

It's a thoroughly goofy photo, and it was good to find it. Because the woman in the photo is now but a shell of herself - her fingers are gnarled, her smile is rare, her plastic nose has been replaced by an oxygen tube. But she once was.