A little something in honor of my mother-in-law

My mother-in-law always insisted she never looked good in photographs, which is probably why she rarely smiled for cameras. Yet here is Kathy Morgan, clearly amused at something I must have said or done while we were waiting for Opera at the Ballpark to start, on a chilly San Francisco afternoon in the summer of 2016.

What she didn’t know was that I would immediately submit this selfie to the Opera’s social media, which flashed it on the jumbotron during intermission. Although she professed to be horrified at the sight of our faces up there for everyone to see, I could tell that she was secretly tickled to have been singled out for a brief moment of minor celebrity. In her words, it was “something,” and something she talked about for years.

Gaining her acceptance wasn’t easy, at least not at first. After all, I was stealing her favorite child away from her. What swayed her opinion (as she later told me) happened years before this photo, during one of her visits when we were still fixing up that first house. She said she wanted to help, so I invited her to join me pulling carpet staples out of the hardwood floors so they could be refinished.

As the two of us yanked and pried together on that dusty floor, she could clearly see how her son and I were a couple; committed to making this house our home, and our future. Although it was a few years before he and I were legally married, from that moment onward she viewed me — and treated me — as her son-in-law.

To me, Kathy Morgan was my mother-in-law from the start, which by now adds up to about half of my lifetime. It saddens me that she’s no longer with us as of yesterday, but I find some consolation in remembering that she was always confident that I would take good care of her son, and that I know she appreciated how I on occasion was able to add a little “something” to her life as well.