My mother had a way of inventing traditions. “It’s Lizzie’s birthday!” she’d proclaim periodically and everyone in the family would don a party hat and sing happy birthday to one of our English Springer Spaniels. The announcement of the dog’s birth and subsequent celebration of it could occur at any time – on April 5, say, or December 12. It could happen twice a year or once every few years. But however haphazard, it became a tradition.
Every so often, we’d gather in the living room; my father on the bongo drums someone had given him for a birthday present, my sister on her recorder, me banging the big copper-bottomed soup pot with a wooden spoon, and my mother on piano, playing from our “American Folk Songs For Piano” songbook. “Love oh love oh careless love,” she’d sing, entirely off-key, “Love oh love oh careless love, love oh love oh careless love, see what love has done to me.”
In the French family, we sleep under quilts. Even when a duvet is
involved, a quilt absolutely must lie atop it. We are used to the
weight of them, and among the five of us, own around three dozen. Each
one of these was handmade, stitch-by-stitch, by my mother. To get an
idea of the scope of this, she quilts daily, and a single quilt takes
over a year to complete. She does not believe in idle hands, or more
precisely, cannot relate to them. Last year I found a melon-sized
rubber band ball sitting on her desk, held it up to my brother and
asked, simply, “Why?” “Because,” he said, “It’s what she does. She
makes things.”
I am addicted to chocolate. I don't mean that I just like to eat
chocolate, I have to eat chocolate. There is no twelve step program,
there are no support groups but I know it is genetic. My mother is also
addicted to chocolate as are two of my six little nieces. Sometimes the
four of us sit around the kitchen table in silence eating chocolate. I
am the enabler. I buy chocolate every time I pass through a duty free
store in an airport. I stop in every bakery I see to buy anything
chocolate they have. I know exactly where all the nice chocolate shops
are in New York City. You get my point?
This summer marks my thirtieth year as an attorney. But when I think back to the summer of 1978 it is not a courtroom that I see; rather I recall a brilliant sunny July day barbecuing at the base of the Seattle Space Needle on a Weber grill. About twenty of us from the country’s largest pork producing states were vying for first place in National Pork Cook-Out Contest. Truth be told though the southern states, principally North Carolina, Texas and Tennessee are known for barbecue the big boys of pork are Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska and Kansas. They were the guys to beat.
Bettie One sang like a bird and dressed like a pirate and sent my
libido into overdrive. She was an intoxicating beauty with a multitude
of talent. But she didn’t have a talent for food presentation.