Night Talk An Encounter with My Mother

[From the preface]
Mothers are strange creatures. Every human being has one. Many animals have one.
Some plants have one.
Woody Allen stated in one of his texts that most people can't stand having a mother without getting sick of her.
I cannot subscribe to such a statement. For me, the plague on earth is not mothers, but mothers-in-law.
So a kind of super-mother. Mother-mother.
I think mothers in themselves are good. Mothers-in-law I would like to see on the list of extinct species.
Some of the greatest people in my life have been mothers.
This volume shows impressions from a long night of conversation I had with my mother Helga Strzolka on April 7, 2022, she was 88 years old at the time. We had a deep conversation about God, in whom she does not believe, the world, in which I do not believe, and our long life together.
I was very grateful at that meeting, at 66 years old, to still have a mother who is in her right mind, who has made many things possible in my life that I would never have achieved without her. I will never forget the long nights when she helped me correct my thesis.
I will never forget the day I owed her the first and only spanking of my life at her hands. Later punishments by her were more subtle.
I was about four years old. The occasion was trivial: in a candy store on Berlin's Hindenburgdamm there were some sugar bombs on display in the tender of a rather shabby plastic steam locomotive, not a real one, of course, but a lousy imitation.
I really wanted to have them. Both. Sugar and plastic. My mother did not want me to have them. I never got them.
But a spanking for rolling around screaming on the pavement in front of the candy store.
We agreed that it was the right decision for her to have left the Muslim slum of Berlin and moved to Föhr after my father's death in 1985. I very much regret not having photographed my father as much as my mother.
I have photographed my mother all my life, since I was 15 years old. I will show some of these pictures in the future as a respectful reminiscence of her. Partly current, partly in reappraisal of my youth-photo-biography.
The most beautiful thing about mothers is that they don't fit into all this LGBTQIA+ craziness. A mother is a mother and not a particle within a delusion that speaks of 243 genders. There are exactly two genders: woman and man.
A mother is a WOMAN. Totally binary. Non-binary mothers cannot exist at all.

Camera: Nikon F
Lens: Nikkor 2,5/105
Film: Kodak TMax 400
Photo lab: Weckbrodt, Hannover, Germany

Listen to "Hunting the wren" with Natalie Merchant as you consider this book.
Greetings
Rainer Strzolka.

Brela, Croatia, April 16, 2023