Hope can be a strategy

Nurse Peg - in the beginning   

No longer pressured by the passage of time within each day, but perhaps only by passage of time itself, she cautiously emerged from her room to meet me. Peg, the name she preferred to be called, was a WWII era nurse, and her service to the country was to be profiled in a Veterans Day article honoring vets in our community. Her daughter was with us to help mom recount exploits from the heady days Nurse Peg cared for wounded servicemen. My role was to listen, comment, and capture portrait images to accompany the story. But now into her ninth decade, Peg’s clarity of recall was not her strength, at least not until just the right button was pressed.

Having heard all her mom’s stories over the years, Peg’s daughter tossed out leading questions to pry open familiar conversational streams. Despite repeatedly treading on well worn turf, the fog of past history would not burn off Peg’s memory bank. When a storyline did open, it was often the one we just heard. Then a breakthrough, not from the right question, but from the small framed photo of a youthful Peg in uniform which her daughter gently placed in her mother’s lap.   

Nurse Peg beamed as her hands bookended the photo. Pictured was a gathering of smiling khaki clad GIs stationed overseas sharing a few light moments. In the center with his arm resting on Peg’s shoulder was American icon Bob Hope. He was at their base entertaining troops as he did for our soldiers everywhere and anywhere, more times than could be counted. The buoyant memory of Hope’s visit radiated through Peg’s fog springing loose other memories, memories previously embedded too deeply to be called up. Stories began to flow, and to her daughter’s amazement, she heard many for the first time. 

An unmistaken twinkle in the eyes shared by mother and daughter now seemed to illuminate the room. The power generated by a single image triggered memory of that distant joyful episode. Both women relished ‘the story of Hope’; one reliving it, the other experiencing it for the first time.

In the glow, I captured the image I wanted.

Nurse Peg - in the end

images © David Greenfield 2016

* Peg is not her real name, rather one used for this posting.

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