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.
Twice a year, (on Mothers Day and on her birthday July 7th), my mother used to pull out her favorite phrase and say, “Attention must be paid.”
Around our house in those days, if you didn’t clean up your room you went to bed without dessert. Not just a mess in your own room, either. If you left a mess anywhere and refused to be responsible for it—reasons ranging from recalcitrance to outright sloth—no matter! There was NO EXCUSE FOR IT! You hit the sack with a hole in your belly. Tough patooties. That was the law of the land.
I had a completely fabulous mother. She was a pretty good cook, except that she was always so busy with her politics, and with being consigliere to her large family, and with talking to my dad while he was on his second job shift, that she almost never cooked dinner without a phone lodged between her shoulder and her ear. This resulted in many culinary tragedies, and seasoning mistakes. Here are two examples.
My mother was born and raised in Houston, which is the most “Southern” of Texas cities. Even her accent had the added rich drawl of her boarding school in Atlanta. That is why, when I think of my mother, I feel Southern. We had southern cooks and when we were not eating at the local Mexican café in Toluca Lake (California – not Mexico) memory dictates that we dined on chicken fried whatever! Chicken, of course, but also pork chops, steaks, fish, and shrimp – virtually everything (except our greens) would be chicken-fried.