Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: The Gift

Timm with niece Kathy in 2007, offering some tips.

The shutterbug gene -- what is it, a gift for seeing? -- passes down, I believe from Mom. She had a battered old Pentax 35mm that she received when she went off to college in the '40s (a family gift from another enthusiast - who, Mom?). When we were kids, she would hunker down squinching her eye in the viewfinder and just wait for the shot. I believe her gift was that what she saw in her heart was translated, through the lens, onto film. There's a gentleness of composition in her pictures of us kids which surely is hued with the soft glow of her feeling.

Timm at play, caught in full innocent intensity by Mom, one Easter long, long ago.

Genetic propensities are strange; gifts pass down the generations, sometimes skip, sometimes litter the fold. They can be strong in one child and absent in another, or show up in various ways in all. Timm took the shutterbug gene to its fullest development - who knows how much further he would have gone, but he seemed headed for a magnificent blossoming. As demonstrated here yesterday, Will is revving it up again with Timm's camera (now Will's camera, his tool.) Molly and I have some taste for it. Molly, I believe, says she used the same method as mother's in waiting for the shot of her kids to come to her. Molly's daughter Cathy, at age 18, is already a gifted photographer with a love of nature shots, especially birds.

Music is almost archetypal in the Cohea/Cobhthaigh legacy of my father; according to its old Gaelic history, the Cobhthaigh clan was said to be a bardic family, harpists and poets who entertained the Norman kings of Ireland and have roots going further back, boating to Iona with St. Columba to Iona in 563 AD and a Cobtach Sweet tune serving as a harpist in the retinue of the mythologicial hero CuChulainn (1st or 2d century BC). Google "Coffey" -- the most common Anglicized spelling of our name -- and you'll find scads of musicians and poets. And lawyers (gift of gab, you know.) Anyone who's heard my father speak in front of a congregation can hear the deep old merry music of the Cobhthaigh clan.

The fish-rider who tops the Cobhthaigh crest bears a strange affinity to the broom- (and later horse-) riders of the adventurer Timm.

All of us kids loved music growing up, and Molly, Timm and I all played guitar. Timm really wanted to make something of his music, but the auto accident that nearly killed him in 1981 clipped the nerves in one ear, and Timm had a hard time triangulating sounds, making performance with others very difficult. He rails at God in his journal once for taking away the gift, yet in the end Timm was a devoted guitar player and singer, performing at his church with great gusto.

In Timm's archives there are a number of shots of performers, like the one above. I believe Oregon Gardens, one of Timm's most frequent freelance customers, offered concerts. Anyway, taking pictures of guitar players like this one must have been bittersweet, because Timm's hearing loss in one ear made performance almost impossible for him.

Back in the '80s, after Timm got his insurance settlement from the accident, I borrowed a thousand bucks from him to buy a camera outfit of my own; the kit included a Nikon FG camera, several lenses, flash and tripod. The works: I thought I was going to become quite the photographer. But for some reason, after I got all of the gear, I lost interest. Music was big for me back then, I thought I would make it playing rock n roll out there and enjoyed writing songs, but that faded in me, too, my guitar diving down a well which sent this love of writing back up into my conscious brain. The archetype was in me but its seeds had fallen on sandy soil. (All that beachside carousing, you know.) I paid back Timm only half the loan, much much later than when I promised to. As I've said, my work on Timm's photo archives are an attempt to pay back the balance of the debt.

I played my first guitar -- well, ukelele -- at aged 3, singing at the left to Big Toad in his yellow pail. That's me at 14 with my first guitar in the middle, and something from my latter rock days, aged, oh, 23. Seven years later the music stopped in me.

Timm also got a good camera back then. I haven't seen many pictures from that period; there is an album which I thought we brought back from Oregon filled with shots from then, but nobody seems to know where it ended up. None of the slides that I have seem to go back that far. How Timm's gift came to maturity is a mystery - he wrote almost nothing in his journal about his photography interests.

As far as genetics go, they have passed on only through Molly to her kids. None of us Cohea boys fathered any kin. (None that we know of, at least.) It's up to Cathy (photographer, artist), Mary Beth (a guitar player) and Sarah (sax player & CEO) to carry on whatever is in the O'Cobhthaigh/Wimberley cup.

Yet the communications of a talent or gift are strange; its DNA is only in one sense physical. Besides, it's a stretch to accord any of our gifts to the illustrious Cobhthaigh legacy; the Cohea name is really ours because Dad's only great-great-grandmother kept it after getting David O'Riley got her pregnant and then was booted off the farm. We should be O'Riley's on that side. Mom's maternal family Mack comes down from a Scots family who lost their name in a border dispute (they used to be MacGregor). As Americans, our family blood is crockpot of just about every lineage - Irish, Scot, German, even some American Indian (on Dad's side, a maternal Renfro was supposed to be Cherokee. I always thought that Will and Timm and Molly inherited an native American nose.)

Let's see, the story behind this: I shot the picture of Dad in front of his chapel back in the 1980's, when the photo bug was big in me; the chapel was an early rising of the ancient builder in Dad; I Photoshopped the picutre, adding a Hubble telescope picture of distant stars because, well, Dad has a creative relation with them.

So whatever lineage we declare is greatly fanciful. But why not, when one takes ownership of a gift and sings it forth? When we were growing up, Timm was Timmy Cohea; first and last names were tweaked to give Timm the heritage he chose. (His maternal uncle Worden - who gives Timm his middle name - sent a letter when Timm was born advising him to choose a spelling of his first name which would give him a unique identity; many years later, Timmy became Tim and then Timm. And then sometime after his divorce from MIkk, Timm had his last named legally changed back to the original, pre-Anglish spelling.)

And if he could choose his legacy, then perhaps what gifts came with it were extra-genetic, too. "As the eye is formed, so are its talents," said William Blake; Timm's creative development follows the choices he made along the way, taking up guitar and pen but really approaching mastery with the camera. But I wonder, did he decide that path or did it decide on him?

Everyone takes picture of the megaliths at Columcille, like this one of Thor's gate ...

... but Timm was one of the few masters.

What Timm saw and was able to capture in his images is laced and striated and veined a lucency which can spark something in us by way of response. The aesthetic transmission relies upon a lot of spiritual brewing and brooding in us. I look at Timm's images and am hushed by their halcyon beauty; I see that same beauty in Will's images. I hear the resonance of something which may be breath, or the surf, or the still, small voice of God in us. And put pen to paper.

I'm grateful that Will is taking such beautiful pictures with Timm's camera. It provides continuity to the tale, the same way that I compose this post with Timm's laptop. Our histories have become quite distant from each other, but each of us kids ferry a love of image and word and sound which comes from our parents -- Mom singing over us as we played on Jacksonville Beach, Dad's musical baritone booming out from the altar at church: gifts of something joyous, merry, and free which are ours now to pour back into the sea, through our children, our makings, our gardens and pets. Timm's creations, and Will's, Molly's, mine: they all lie on the beach at first light like shells still resonant with those first sounds: maybe someone next will pick them up and hear the same music and want to carry it on in their own creations. Maybe the tide will just carry those productions back into the sea where the sounding it infinite and the vaults are God's.