Free Ansel Adams by Mary Street Alinder

a sharp knock on our front door. Wrapping a robe about myself, I answered it to find Ansel on the other side. Almost bashfully, he asked, “Can Jim come out and photograph?” though I knew he meant “play.”
    Ansel came in and stood behind the couch watching cartoons with the kids as Jim and I got dressed. Eager to get going, his fancy not caught by Scooby Doo , Ansel wandered out onto our back deck. Fog covered the Monterey Peninsula, our house included. The sun’s light was diffused and flat through this damp shroud.
    Jim habitually made portraits of the many great photographers who came to our house over the years, and for just this purpose, he had attached an old movie screen under an eave on the deck that he could unroll and use as a plain backdrop. He now pulled out a kitchen stool and asked Ansel if he would sit for him. Ansel kindly obliged, and with his trusty Hasselblad on a tripod, Jim made the best portrait of Ansel that ever was. It was the unanimous choice for the cover image of Ansel’s autobiography, and I have always thought that one of the major reasons that the book became a bestseller was the warmth of his face in that photograph. Ansel himself seems to come right through the image and into life.
    Next, Ansel picked up his own camera and photographed Jim and me. And then they were out the door and down the road to the oldest grove of Monterey cypress in the world, tramping around and making exposure after exposure—all in all, a fine way to spend a Saturday.
    An expanding list of ailments had been besieging Ansel for years, with accelerating frequency. While he was still in his twenties, his teeth plagued him so much, the pain especially severe on freezing High Sierra nights, that he had them all pulled. He was afflicted with arthritis and gout. His prostate had been removed, a hernia had been repaired, and his heart had a new valve and a triple coronary bypass. As a long-lasting side effect of the surgery, he suffered from vertigo.
    Most proud that his new heart valve was of direct porcine descent, Ansel occasionally allowed this new body part to announce itself with a brotherly hoglike snort, which sometimes proved quite startling to those unfamiliar with his love of a good joke.
    Undoubtedly my biggest failing as far as Ansel was concerned, even bigger than my inability to see the green flash, was my mental density when it came to jokes. Ansel had certain friends whom he would ring up almost daily to regale with his latest story and to coax a new one from. Since I was almost always with him, I was his closest audience. As with the green flash, he never gave up on me, but too many times, I just didn’t get it. Even worse, I could never remember or retell a joke told to me so AA (as we called Ansel) could add it to his repertoire.
    The one joke that he probably told more times than any other—including to President Ford’s wife, Betty—I wrote down one night so that I wouldn’t forget it. Props and sound effects were added bonuses when Ansel told a joke. At the end of dinner, Ansel took his napkin and plopped it on his head like a doily on the crown of a sweet old lady. Setting the stage, he explained that a hen had just fled across the yard, pursued by a randy rooster. Ansel then went into character and commenced rocking, his hands miming knitting motions. With just slightly crossed eyes, his first old woman exclaimed, “Dearie me, would you look at that!” A second old lady (who looked just like the first) responded, “Oh, my!” Our narrator returned to relate frantically that the hen, in her terror, had fled across the highway, been hit by a truck, and was now reduced to drumsticks. Rocking and knitting again, Ansel coyly demurred, “See? She’d rather die!” No matter how many times he told this joke, it always made him bellow with laughter, and everyone else, too. His great enjoyment was infectious.
    In September 1981, Ansel had an angiogram, one of the many tests he readily