One was when we were younger, she drove us to Tower Hill School in the morning in her negligée. She didn’t have a flannel bathrobe on top of it. And one morning, the worst happened: she got pulled over by a cop. We were humiliated.
The other thing we learned from her, and she taught it to my family and my children, was she would go to a grocery store and she would buy a jar of marshmallow whip or a whole cheesecake and we’d eat it that night. She also taught us that birthday cakes had that row of frosting along the bottom so you could take your finger around it and eat it. My children said when their father remarried somebody else that they didn’t realise that when you got a coffee cake, you didn’t cut it into thirds or fourths and ea
t the whole thing, but cut it into little slices that kept it going for days. That’s from my mother. Also when we were young, we had to eat everything, but we could ‘take’ one thing that we didn’t have to eat. I fluctuated between liver and sweetbreads; sweetbreads usually won out. If I took sweetbreads, then we started having liver more often, so I learned to swallow sweetbreads whole without chewing them, which has come in very handy when trying to swallow pills and things like that without water.Another thing we remember is her swimming method. In the swimming pool, she did sidestroke with her head like this and she never got her hair wet. She was also very thrifty, which we learned from her. If she cooked oatmeal for breakfast, sometimes it had little bugs in it. We were allowed to pick them out but we had to eat the oatmeal anyway. One time a piece of peppermint candy fell into the green beans that we were supposed to have for dinner, and so we did have peppermint-flavoured green beans.
She taught me the rules about alcoholic beverages. I learned never to drink before five except on weekends and holidays, and then we could do it earlier, like at lunch. She also taught me never to drink alone. It was okay over the telephone, but she said that you couldn’t drink alone until you were 40, and after 40, it was okay. Nobody understood why I looked forward to my 40th birthday.
In recent years, she had diabetes. She and I used to go to Florida and sit in front of the TV and eat a huge box of meringues together, and I had a feeling that that didn’t stop. I was up visiting her and I opened the cabinet underneath her bathroom sink and there was a thing of meringues. And I knew she wouldn’t have enough nerve to confront me so I just would eat as many meringues as I wanted to and she never would mention what happened to the meringues.
Driving---you’ve heard some things about driving and some of you have been fortunate enough to ride with her and survive. As Tia said, she had an angel riding with her. When she had The Taco Bell Incident, she had gotten some tacos and was crossing the three southbound lanes on 202 trying to make an immediate right turn while eating a taco, which she denied doing. However, she asked me to go pick up the stuff left in her totalled car and the man told me he found half a taco on the windshield. So I came home and I said, "Mother, how come he found half a taco stuck on the windshield if you weren’t eating tacos while you were driving?" She didn’t bat an eyelid and said, "It must have been the cops."
She was an amazing person. It’s hard to believe that I can’t call her up and say, “Mother, I can’t remember what that plant was”--the botanical name. I’d describe it to her and she’d come up with it immediately. Now I have to go to my books, I guess.
She was an amazing mother, an amazing woman and the first Elizabeth Taylor who lived her life to the fullest.
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