Page 41 - WTP VOl. X #4

“That’s what they say, sir,” Dad concluded noncommittally.
He sealed the job offer by shaking the large hand extended across the desk to his small one. Dad had confessed to Mom that winning the Weston Award was the biggest surprise of his life. He was only vaguely aware of Weston’s work—he preferred Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams. In fact, he’d had Adams in mind when he shot that sand dune.
But it didn’t surprise Mom. She was a fan of Edward Weston, was certain that the nude photos of Weston’s second wife Charis—taken on the sand dunes of Santa Monica, California—had influenced the Weston judges, subconsciously predisposed by the typo. And so, pleased with their mutual interest in photogra- phy, she had invited Dad skiing—once he settled into the job, of course—under the guise of needing some help with monitoring the growing numbers of young women in the Spring Hill ski club.
~
Despite being in the English Department, Mom was into Oriental languages, then Oriental philosophies, trying them on as she did her new shoes up at the Roanoke Mall—fascinated for the moment, then disappointed—constantly searching for something more stylish. She’d developed the interest long be- fore she met Dad.
Books like The Sparkling Buddha, Zen Archers, and slim volumes of haiku by Basho, Ryota and Sampu appeared from time to time on the board-and-cin- derblock bookshelf in the apartment she rented on the far side of Spring Hill. But the most influential
of all was the I Ching, a thick hardbound tome in a gray dust jacket embossed with mysterious Chinese characters. For a while, about the time Dad first met her, she’d done nothing without consulting it. And for a while, when Dad told me about it, all I could think of was a needlepoint sampler in the window of Old Man Kelsey’s Handi-Foods store beyond our house
on Bluff Road, with its bit of Chinese folklore about the morning glory, which represents a single day for lovers to meet.
“It’s a distillation of ancient wisdom,” Mom explained on the morning after Dad first spent the night at her apartment. “A primitive computer for self-examina- tion. I Ching means Book of Changes. The introduc- tion is by Karl Jung.”
(continued on next page)
“The framed black-and-white photograph on our Bluff Road
living room wall, centered above Mom’s piano, was responsible for Dad’s career, his marriage to Mom, and me—a photo of a sand dune taken with a Diana camera.”
34