Remembering an Original

My late mother didn’t just appreciate the finer things in life, she demanded everyone else to as well. 

One time, when a restaurant hostess was asking about her handbag, Mom snipped at her: “It’s Celine. Learn it.” She loved caviar and champagne and French food; made frequent shopping and theater trips to New York; gallivanted all over the globe like Auntie Mame after she married Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, and seemed to have found her spiritual home amid the opulence of Dubai. She knew how to bring out the fabulous.

 

I fondly remember her extravagancies. The product of a different time and place, she attended a 1950s finishing school where she majored in delegation. She married a doctor, joined her parents’ country club, and fed us whatever we wanted from McDonald’s whenever my father wasn’t looking. 

In the summer we ate almost every meal at the country club, and our bills were so unwieldy they arrived in two envelopes. We were raised on the bottle. She would have had the housekeeper breastfeed us if Mom could only get her to lactate.

 

The anti-Martha Stewart, she shunned cooking, cleaning, or doing much of anything else around the house. Resenting us telling her to buy a coffeemaker, she defiantly insisted on drinking instant. 

She did know how to broil a mean steak, the one thing she would serve to my dad with regularity. When she once tried to warm a takeout pizza in the oven, she left it in the box and started a fire. 

 

Rarely out of bed before 11 am, I think of her cursing the morning light the way starlets do when the domestic help draws open the curtains in old Hollywood films. It was her joy to stay up all hours watching those black and white films. She woke up slowly and consumed the New York Times along with fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee with sugar and milk, and a buttered bagel – sometimes with strawberry preserves. 

She never fully grasped that my PR work involved getting articles published in the papers she read and unfailingly phoned to inform me that my place of work was in the paper or on TV. 

Her own work history was comprised of getting fired for eating the goods while employed at a department store candy counter as a teenager, and a bit later in life, modeling the latest fashions at ladies’ luncheons sponsored by these same department stores.

Once, when I was in the hospital with a staph infection, she dropped by with a care package consisting of a bunch of grapes, two giant wedges of Jarlsberg cheese, and a salami. Also not that helpful: her dropping off the raw ingredients to prepare a complete three-course salmon dinner when Joe and I had just traveled 20 hours to get home from a trip to Bora Bora. I had asked her to bring us food, and she probably figured that other people cooked all the time so why not bring groceries?

 

Mom always had an army of helpers – housekeepers, gardeners, laundresses, caterers, delivery people -- at her beck and call. She had people to bring over single bottles of orange juice when she was out and people to change light bulbs for her when she needed the assist. 

 

I don’t see any of these proclivities as shortcomings. She was who she was and made no apologies. We could all learn a thing or two from her chutzpa. I have a lot of my mother in me.

 

Mom would have been 86 this November 12^th. I miss her and will be making reservations in her honor.