Mother's Day

My mother's name is Iris, poor thing, and that's only because for the first 18 years of my life every Mother's Day she'd receive the what-I-thought-was-clever "purple flower" in one form or another.  

She straightened me out in college and since then my annual quest to find something unique-enough, classic-enough, interesting-enough for Iris continues.

Got an Iris in your life? Check out this week's Things We Love: A Mother's Day Gift Guide, a tightly edited collection of things we love for mom.

After a week in Dublin, the mother and child reunion tour moves to a town in Sicily, Taormina –built on a cliff above the aqua sea with a snow-capped volcano behind it. After settling into our room, Rachel says she wants to make no plans and have no agenda.

There are hundreds of sites to explore in Sicily: more Greek temples than in Greece; Roman ruins; Arabian ports, and chains of volcanic islands with black sand beaches. But for the next week, we'll see almost none of them.

We give ourselves over to il bel far niente, the beautiful doing nothing. Italians have raised this to an art form, but I get nervous when Rachel suggests I take off my watch.

My mother happily referred to herself as a “good eater.” Although she was very petite, she could out-eat even our teenaged sons. Every year for Mother’s Day the Southern California branch of the family would drive to Little Saigon in Westminster and eat at Dong Khanh, where my mom ordered her favorites: lemon grass chicken, lobster in black pepper sauce, chow mein noodles with squid, vermicelli with bbq pork, spring rolls and a large bowl of pho ga — chicken vermicelli soup.

As much as she loved Dong Khanh’s food, though, she insisted that the dessert be homemade. Since I was the cook in the family, I happily took on the assignment, and the waiters at Dong Kahn had long ago accepted our ritual so they were always ready with a stack of small plates and forks.

Over the years I made her many desserts: pound cake, hazelnut cheesecake, flourless chocolate cake, baked plums, bread pudding . . . but she pronounced the last one as the best — a banana cake with chocolate chips and roasted walnuts.

My mother was born in Paris but to very provincial Spanish parents.  She married my father when she was 23, and he whisked her away to New Jersey to live.  Princeton, but still.  She had a lot of adjusting to do.

By the time I was born ten years later, you'd think she would have had ample time to acclimate.  But, she clung to her old-fashioned, handed- down-by- Spanish -grandmother-ways.  She  steadfastly refused to succumb to the allure of the Breck Girl... She put lemon juice on my hair to lighten it, olive oil to moisturize it, and vinegar on to detangle it.   I went to school smelling like salad.

Lunchtime was equally traumatic.   Everyone else had nice, shiny metal lunch boxes bursting with cultural relevancy and advertising.   I had a brown paper bag.   The over-sized one my mother got from the grocery store.  Wrinkled from multiple uses.