Memory album
By Marla Brown Fogelman
Several months before my mother’s 78th birthday, she and I were sitting at her kitchen table in Wilmington, Del., looking at the photos and clippings in a large, tattered album from her high school days.
“It’s in such bad condition, I ought to throw it out,” she said.
As we leafed through the stiff, yellowed pages and at the many pictures in which she resembled a young Elizabeth Taylor, I discovered that Mom had been an exceptional student. She won several academic awards and was valedictorian of her 1947 class. “My oration was on ‘Idealism vs. Materialism,’” she told me.
“I never knew you were valedictorian!” I exclaimed, thinking about how Mom, like many women of her day, had dropped out of college to get married.
Maybe now was the time to ask her about dreams deferred, I wondered, but Mom had already moved on. Pointing to an old boyfriend’s photo, she said, “Don’t tell your father about him–he’ll be jealous.”
Marla Brown Fogelman is a freelance writer in Silver Spring.