Here There and Everywhere

Talking With My Mom in the Commissary

“Mom! Look at the price on that flank steak!” When she sent me off to college, one of the pieces of advice she shared with me was never to spend more than $1.25 per pound on flank steak, one of the leanest, thriftiest cuts of beef available. Even four years later, the butcher looked at me in amazement and said “your mother’s information is out of date.”

But when I saw these breathtaking prices – even marked down! – for flank steak, I couldn’t help taking a photo to share with Mom.

Yes, I still talk with my Mom, I can’t help it. She should not have died when she did, one of the earliest victims of COVID. I have so much admiration for the choice she made – she chose not to be intubated. Intubation machines were limited, and she wanted younger people to have priority on their usage. She was 96. Her mother lived to 104. She requested hospice, and went quietly and without pain. I still choke to think of it, but it was her choice, and a heroic choice.

“Can you believe this?” I ask my mother, incredulously. “Hershey’s chocolate FLAVOR! Not even real chocolate!” and Mom replies in my head, telling me not to buy it, it’s just chemicals.

As the oldest daughter, some of my earliest memories are Saturday trips to the supermarket, wheeling the basket while Mom filled it, stopping now and then to chat with shopping neighbors, or to show me a label and what it meant. It was excruciatingly boring. I learned a lot.

She also taughte me to cook. I’m not the greatest cook (neither was she), but, like her, I have a few great recipes that make me look better than I am. Some of them are hers 😊. Even better, when we were cleaning out her condo, I found this old set of measuring spoons, which I brought home and still use. They must be seventy or eighty years old; look how thin the aluminum is.

I talk to her in the kitchen, too. Yesterday, I made her Autumn Plum Cake (Pflaumekeuchen) (you can get the recipe by typing that into the search box, it’s a great, easy recipe for an Alsatian kind of torte) only I used fresh cherries, and it turned out really juicy. She just laughed (in my head) and told me not to try it with blueberries, that they are a real mess. But she never really liked blueberries.

I have some strange beliefs, including the veil between life and death being a lot thinner than we know. The last message my Mother left on my phone was about some masks I made and sent; she was excited for them to arrive, but that night she fell ill and went to the hospital. She never got to see the masks.

May 22, 2026 - Posted by intlxpatr | Aging, Biography, Circle of Life and Death, Family Issues