Stand By Me assignment EXEMPLAR

My mother would have been 81 today.  She was my hero.  She was vivacious, funny, wry, had a big personality and could make all the heads turn her way upon entering a room.  She loved people, she loved life.  She was a chef in a restaurant called The Peasant Stock,  in Cambridge, Ma.  She experimented with using peanuts with chicken dishes, she made the best bouillabaise in all the world, and she often cooked in bare feet, always wearing her Marimekko dresses in bright colors.  She was never bored, and she was never still.  She began every day with coffee, the newspaper, Robert J. Lurtsema's morning music program, and the New York Times crossword puzzles.

She raised five children, all girls, I was the middle child.  If you were sick, she would put her large cool hand on your forehead, to tell your temperature.  She could detect it within two degrees.  She was no nonsense, however, so if you pretended to be sick to get out of going to school, she always knew.  She would make it completely undesirable for you to miss school, by paying absolutely no attention to you, and telling you to go to your room until you felt better.  She could be tough, but she was also full of compassion and empathy.  She knew what it felt like to be an outsider, to be different, to be creative.  If you felt really lonely sometimes she would make you toast, cut in long strips with melted butter and cinnamon sugar.   These toast strips were called "cinnamon soldiers."

  She was a writer, a poet; she framed all her rejection letters from The New Yorker and put them in our downstairs bathroom.  She wrote letters to famous people, like Elizabeth Taylor and Jorge Luis Borges and they wrote her back.  Those letters were framed in the bathroom as well.  She took writing classes when we were little, kept big spiral-bound notebooks full of poetry, ideas, stories.  I remember she loved going to writing camp in the summer at Sewanee.  She brought back many sweatshirts and t-shirts from those trips, of all sizes and shapes.  I have kept the tiny ones for my grandchildren.

I remember many important moments when my mother stood by me.  The time I remember most vividly was when I had gone to many auditions for a solo part in a choral piece in Boston.  I was really nervous for the first audition, but when I went back for the next two rounds, I remember becoming more and more confident in my singing and being really sure about how I was perfect for the part.  So- when I didn't get it, I was devastated.  I called my Mom, and she said, "Oh Sweetheart, I don't blame you for being upset.  You totally deserved that part.  I am sure it was completely political!"  That was my Mom- writer, poet, party-goer, movie-goer, champion to those whom she loved, rooting for us, even when we never knew it.