The thing I knew for sure about Mom is that she knew everything.  Or, at least, she knew whatever I needed to know.  I think most of all she knew how to love me.  She knew how to nurture and support and encourage me—and all four of us girls.  I loved how we all had our own toys or household items in our assigned “favorite” colors.  Of course, she already knew that I liked blue best, and it’s still my favorite color.  

One year for Christmas we all got big stuffed dogs we could sit on.  Another year we all got kitty cat chairs.  Every year I loved decorating the reindeer cookies with icing eyes and collars.  For Easter we always got pretty new dresses—and shoes and socks and pocketbooks and maybe spring coats or sweaters and even hats when we were little.  I know we looked adorable, because I remember people telling us we did.  “And no boys?” they sometimes said to us.  “No boys!” I would reply proudly.  No yucky boys, I always thought. 

I remember our trip to New York City when Kate insisted on going through the lobby of our real hotel with her enormous Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent wrapped around her.  I think Mom was a little embarrassed, but we never saw anything wrong with it.  New York was just one of the fascinating places she and Daddy took us.  I loved seeing the US on our family vacations—even when, as a money-saving measure, she made us switch to camping and I cried at the prospect.  All our adventures together around Europe were especially sweet.  She and Daddy just let me and Maurice be in charge and take them wherever we wanted to go.  

Closer to home, Mom always took me to the Walters Art Gallery after my orthodontist appointments downtown.  My favorite display was the mummies with their big teeth, leathery skin and crooked toenails.  Maybe that’s why I got such a kick out of showing Mom the “uncorrupted body” of Santa Lucia in the gaudy little shrine near the train station in Venice.  She helped me appreciate all the fine arts.  Sometimes after I went up to bed she turned “Flight of the Bumblebee” up loud on the stereo so I could hear it in my room.  She took us to children’s theater.  She always got us lots of books.  And we all took dance lessons, which turned into long Friday afternoons at the Rec, alternating between lessons and hanging out with girlfriends and hiding from the boys who harassed us.  We weren’t allowed to cross Old Harford Road by ourselves, so when we finished at the Rec we stood on the other side of the street and called her.  “Mommy!” we would yell across the traffic, except for Donna K who called out, “Jan’s Mother!”

All through the years Mom hugged us and held us.  I probably sat on Mom’s lap up until the time I had my own children—her grandchildren.  Then she excitedly got out our old crib, unpacked toys and blocks and books, and, when she could, she and Daddy traveled to wherever we lived to get to know the boys and love them and play with them and help them clean and organize their rooms.  It was the beginning of the next generation for Mom to pour herself into as she did for us girls, to help us, their parents, provide a cocoon of security and affection as she did for us.

The place I think of as a kind of representative slice of our family life is the dining room.  I remember, at Lisa’s birth, the rest of us finding three new dollies and doll supplies, all in pink bassinets, in the dining room on Heathfield Road.  On Berwick Avenue I remember helping Mom wrap Christmas presents and sitting under the dining room table when she wrapped mine.  And how often did Mom say, when we were all teenagers, that our dining room on Old Harford Road was like the set of a play?  As we ate we argued, shared tales of woe and success and high comedy, and jumped up to act out the crazy teachers and weird kids at school.  Then after dinner Mom and Dad usually read the paper for a while at the table as people arrived and departed, stopping in the centrally located dining room to describe their comings and goings, often with great drama.  We invited friends for dinner.  My friend Lois told me one of her earliest memories of my mother:  “We were sitting down to dinner at your dining room table in the summertime after a day outside,” writes Lois.  “We got sunburned and your mother told us that we couldn’t put Noxzema on any body part that would touch the furniture.  I expressed surprise.  She assured me she meant it!”  Mom hosted several exchange students, and I always volunteered her for the main course for the Luther League progressive dinners.  For years Maurice regularly ate two dinners (one at his house and one at ours), until finally he just ate at our house every night.  Mom once told me, “If we’d thought we could have afforded a fifth child, we would have had one.”  After dinner on the last day of school before Christmas, we had fun helping Mom open all her teacher presents.  Sunday dinner for the whole family and all hangers-on was at Gammy’s (my grandmother’s) until, at about age 90, she couldn’t do it anymore and Mom moved it to her house.  Whenever Maurice and the boys and I changed residences, Mom welcomed us to move back in for as long as we needed to and added us again to the table mix.  We were the ones she and Daddy killed the fatted calf for.  And all that time I never knew Mom didn’t really like to cook.  Decades later when she and Daddy came regularly to our house for Sunday dinner, she often told me how much she enjoyed it and how glad she was she didn’t have to cook it.

When we traveled, we took our dining room with us, in a manner of speaking, and continued to share our adventures over food prepared by others.  I know Kate and Tom remember the picnic of pastries and champagne near General Patton’s grave in Luxembourg—the kickoff to our European Tour of ‘84.  How about the meals on the patio of our house in Italy with the view over the soybean fields and the sun setting behind the Asiago?  There were dinners at dusk in elegantly shabby, ancient courtyard restaurants in small towns in Yugoslavia, and breakfast in the ever-so-Bavarian-ly charming Zimmer Frei with cinnamon bread and soft-boiled eggs—that was the town where the cow backed into Mom and Dad’s brand new VW van.  There were riverside pub lunches when we lived in England.  And I’ll never forget the exquisite meal Lisa took us to that began with perfect tomatoes and fresh basil and real mozzarella in a minuscule al fresco restaurant clinging to the side of a mountain on the isle of Capri with the sun setting over the water and violin music playing.  Then there was the superb dinner in Saumur that I negotiated entirely in French while the rest of the group smiled agreeably; Mom told me that when I had to do all the talking she felt like they were inmates on an excursion from the asylum.  Perhaps some of our best meals were on the cruises Maurice and I took with Mom and Dad after our boys were grown.  How can we have been blessed with so much bounty in one lifetime?

I recall a dinner on a family vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine, with Mom and Daddy and us four girls.  I don’t know what we ate, and I don’t know what we talked about, but I remember sitting in a pool of yellow light in the center of a restaurant.  We must have all had a good day and not been too tired, and our conversation flowed full of stories and laughs and pleasure.  I had the sense that it wasn’t even us because we seemed at that moment picture-perfect.  We could have been a scene in a wholesome family movie.  People glanced at us and smiled.  Someone even stopped at the table and complimented Mom and Dad on their lovely family.  Eventually the dinner ended and we walked out smiling into the night.  I am thankful to my mother for her love, and for all the dinners, and for that perfect dinner in Maine.  Its richness nestles deep in my memory.  It is the distilled essence of the love she and Daddy poured into our family, and it is the foretaste of the Feast to come, when all our family—past and far-flung present and future yet to be loved—when we all gather in youth and health forever at the marriage supper of the Lamb.