ElderChicks

My mother (long gone to wherever) was not the kind of person you might look forward to meeting. The first thing she’d ask upon entering your home is if you had a cigarette.  You‘d say no, and she‘d take out one of her open purse.  And then she’d ask if you had a match and you’d say no and again she’d take out one of her own bag.  And then she’d light up and ask how come you don’t to have any ashtrays as she flicked her ashes into one of the Toby mugs in your collection.  And then she’d look around your living room and ask if it was decorated by The Beastie Boys.  Don‘t ask.

We (my two brothers and I) were a one parent household.  Our father was taken away when I was five.  I mean literally taken away. We were sitting around listening to Fibber McGee when two tough looking men came in and took him away.  We later heard that he had a Kung Fu academy in Malaysia, but we never saw or heard from him since Fibber opened his closet to look for some Quink for his pen.  Good riddance, my mother would say whenever the subject came up.   Our family name is Riddance and I only leared later that my father’s name was Goodwin, so it wasn’t the insult that I originally thought it was.  She was just remembering in her own way.

We lived, if I must say so myself, very well — and since my mother never worked a day in her life, I wondered where the money came from.  We had servants, fancy cars, the works — only the food was dreadful: roots, berries, tree bark  and God knows what-all; drenched in peanut oil and seasoned with ginger.  Believe me, it was dreadful.  I‘d complain and all mom would say is “gee“ which I finally realized was “ghee“…   It was only after she was gone that I discovered how we lived so well and why we ate so poorly.

Mom kept a box with old letters, and reading through them I soon learned that my mom, Bernice Riddance of Rahway, NJ, was the secret love goddess of Mahatma Gandhi and he was sending her money every month from his Poor Starving India Fund.  They met at a protest rally in Bombay when she was serving as a nurse with the British Fifth Gurkha Brigade — and if one can believe the letters, they remained lovers ever since.  In fact, the two of them were planning to run away to open a vegetarian Indian restaurant (Gandhi’s Gourmet Palace) in El Paso when he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet.  So all those years, my mom, the Love Goddess,  was trying out different recipes.  This explains a lot – and I wish I knew all of this before turning her over to the FBI for the reward from her Baader Meinhof days.  But that’s another story. . . . .