Tiramisu Square

  It takes a village to raise a child, Hillary Clinton once wrote, appropriating an old proverb thought to have African origins.  Here's a twist on that: It takes a village to praise a 90-year-old. Especially when that nonagenarian  believes in her own specialness. "I think I'm entitled to a party, aren't I? she asked recently. "It's not every day you turn 90."  Let's face it: By the time you're a nonagenarian, you have a accrued a good number of relatives and friends. So my siblings and I threw a surprise party for mom with about 35 of them. Despite her own suggestion of a party, she walked in the door not entirely shocked but a little intimidated by the crowd that met her angling for hugs and "look here" photos. As is her nature, she greeted guests wearing a gold sash with the number 90 on it. She sashayed around like a senior beauty pageant winner.      Two days later, she couldn't wait to tell me about some of her gifts: a Bette ...

    I love to watch when my mother gets together with her best friend, and not just because they met on the day I was born in 1960.  I was Mom's first child; Dolores had just had her second. Mom went through a difficult labor, Dolores sailed through hers. So she showed up at my worn-out mother's hospital bedside with a cigarette in her hand ready to chat. (You could smoke in hospitals then, and new mothers rested in maternity wards with long rows of beds.)  As mom talked with Dolores, they realized they both lived on the same street of new rowhomes in Northeast Philadelphia: the 3300 block of Morning Glory Road, a future microcosm of the Baby Boom.  She lived at 3333, we were at 3359. Existentially speaking, I don't think you can find a better example of the human condition than two friends who have known each other for 65 years. Who raised eight children between them, stretched a dollar like it was taffy, lived 26 houses apart and did all the things that went w...

"You have to write about that day." So said my mother a few days after we took a trip by bus to see the annual Rockettes holiday show at Radio City Music Hall, the one where 36 young women perform so uniformally, you'd swear they were puppets.  The best is when they fall backward into each other like dominoes, looking like the folds of an accordion.  It may not be high art, but the Rockettes can make you warm inside, even wistful. I saw it in my mother's face as the show opened with a nostalgic display of lights and images and she choked up a bit.   It was a dreary and drizzly day in New York, yet the crowds were out in full force. It more than once felt as if we would be suffocated on the sidewalk by the crush of people, then stepped over like a muddy puddle.  Manhattan at Christmas is not for the faint of heart.  But mom was a champ, riding my left arm and gripping her cane with the right as we got off the bus and headed to the first restaurant we laid ey...

  We were going to the presidential inauguration, mom and I. Not his, hers. That was the goal when I stepped into a Philadelphia voting booth on the evening of Election Day to ensure my 89-year-old mother wasn't intimidated by the electronic technology that would record her vote. She hadn't cast a presidential ballot in person since Kennedy - John, not Ted. At the Ward 65, Division 4 polling place, mom wore her Kamala shirt. I wore enough anxious hope on my face to see through a catcher's mask. The vote itself took all of 15 minutes on a warm autumn night that held so much promise, before it didn't. Then it all unraveled. I was spending the night with my mother to celebrate the person I expected - albeit nervously since July - to be the first female president in my lifetime. But especially in mom's lifetime; she will be 90 in May. I have never seen her as engaged with politics as she was this year. She has a Harris-Walz postcard on her refrigerator. A photo of the v...

My mother has a keen interest in this year's presidential election, something she hasn't manifested since she voted for JFK in 1960. So much so that she has decided she wants to share her enthusiasm with the other tenants in her Philadelphia apartment complex.  "I want to go door to door," she said. There's only one problem: She wants to canvass for Carmela. I can hear the conversations now.  Mom: Hi there! What do you think of Carmela?  Tenant: Who? Mom: You know, the one running against Trump. Tenant: I've got dinner on the stove. Gotta go. Mom: Hi there! Can I persuade you to vote for Carmela? Tenant: Sorry gotta go, but thanks for stopping by.  Mom: Hi! Do you think you might vote for Carmela? Tenant: Who? When's the last time you voted? Mom (Not wanting to give her age away): Clifton. Tenant: Who?  Mom: You know, the one who had sex with that girl Levinsky. Eventually the apartment dwellers will have had enough.  Building supervisor to mom: Please re...

One of my mother's favorite lines from way back is, "Don't just stand there with your teeth in your mouth." It meant, in her vernacular, that we should do something useful, and not that we needed to see a dentist. But another saying of hers always seemed to me to defy sense or meaning: "If they don't like it, they can lump it." As in when my mother - who had a lot of short-term, part-time jobs - made so many demands on employers, we made a joke of one of them: "I can't work on days that begin with T and I need the whole summer off. If they don't like it, they can lump it." Lump it. So just what did that mean? I don't know what took me so long, but I Googled the answer.  Turns out it does have a sensible meaning after all, according to the Cambridge Dictionary: If you tell someone to like it or lump it, you mean that they must accept a situation they don't like because it won't be changed.  But what exactly does lump mean in ...