In The Beginning
			by Margaret Fieland
	In The Beginning

My mother was thirty-seven when I was born in 1946, which for the time was unusually late for a first child. It was years before I knew her true age: when I was in elementary school she took ten years off her age. She later claimed it was because she was afraid my sister and I would be nervous, as the (much younger) parents of a couple of our friends had died unexpectedly. When I asked one of my cousins about this years later she admitted that they had known and had kept the secret. I was bummed. I was also mad at myself for not figuring the whole thing out. I'd had all the data: my grandmother's age, the age my grandmother was when my mother was born, and my mother's age. They didn't add up. I figured that much out, but was unable to come to the now obvious conclusion: my mother had lied about her age.
She carried it off well, as in fact she looked younger than her actual age. Late gray hair runs in the family: by the time she died at 75 her hair was gray (not white) but it was still dark right up through my teen years. 
We learned the truth when my sister when for working papers. She had to bring in her birth certificate; my mother didn't want to hand it over. I still wonder if Shelley would have looked the certificate over so carefully if my mother had played it cool. But she didn't, so Shelley took a very close look at it when she finally got hold of it. She confronted my mother that evening. I remember finding the whole thing for some odd reason very funny, as did my sister. 
My mother had been married for four years by the time I was born. My father had enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor. My parents were married by this time and my mother followed him around from base to base in the US, including, as I remember it, a number of cities in the Midwest that my mother and father, both born and raised in Manhattan, would have had otherwise no interest in visiting and some that, due to dreary weather, she was happy never to have to see again. Then he was sent overseas and she moved back to New York. He was overseas for about a year; I was conceived after he returned home. My sister was born two years later.
I don't remember, if I ever knew, the whole list of just what was preventing my mother from conceiving in the first years of her marriage. I do know that they finally discovered that her thyroid too low, and that it took them a while to figure this out because she was thin and active. She also had uterine fibroids, and by the time she wanted to try for a second child she had been told by at least one doctor that she needed an immediate hysterectomy.
My mother, however, was nothing if not determined: she doctor shopped, finally turning up one, renowned obstetrician Dr. William Hellmann, who was willing to give it a shot. As my mother told it, he warned her that she might lose the baby, but that if she was willing to take that chance, then he certainly was. She ended up on bed rest for the last six weeks of her pregnancy. By this time she was 39, almost 40 in fact, with a child (me) who wouldn't turn two until a week before the birth of the second child, my sister. Six weeks later she had a hysterectomy. 

                                                    AAA to the Rescue

As you may know if you're a regular reader of this magazine, I joined AAA many years ago when my boyfriend's VW broke down on Montauk Highway on Long Island some time after Midnight. After being rescued by a mechanic celebrating at a goodbye party at a nearby gas station, we decided we'd probably never be that lucky again, so we joined AAA.

AAA has saved the day many times since then. It rescued me when the battery fell through the rusted out floor of the VW a couple of years later. It rescued us when we blew a hose in Worchester at 2 AM. It rescued me when my car broke down in Weston during a snow storm. But I particularly remember when they rescued me and my girlfriend when my car broke down on the off ramp of route 128.

Renee (not her real name) and I had just returned by bus from the Stonewall 25 parade and celebration in New York. We'd picked up my car where I'd left it, in the parking lot of the Riverside MBTA station, and started for home. We were just pulling off route 128 onto route 30 in Newton, Massachusetts, when the car died. Yup, right there on the off ramp. Trust me, this is not a good place to leave a car, even at 10 PM.

It was late, it was dark, and we were tired, but nevertheless we walked from the car to a nearby hotel to call AAA. I felt self-conscious walking into the hotel lobby – I was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the message, “But Ma, She Is My Mr. Right,” a fine thing to wear at a gay pride parade, but quite another, I felt, in the hotel lobby. But too bad – we needed to call AAA.

We called, then went outside to wait. After a few minutes a police car drew up and a cop got out and approached us.

“Is that your car there on the off ramp?” he said, completely ignoring my t-shirt. “We need to get it off there.”

“Tell me about it,,” I said, “We called AAA and they should be here soon. It's White's Garage,” I added, having broken down in the area several times.

“I'll give them a call and ask them to hurry,” he said, “and meanwhile let's get back to that car.”

So we went back to the car, the cop put out flares, and we waited for White's to arrive. When they did, Renee and I rode in the truck when they towed the car back home. The driver, too, barely glanced at my t-shirt. I guess he had better things to worry about.

The car needed about $1000 worth of engine work, which I ultimately decided on doing as I didn't have the money for a new car.

I did wonder afterwards if I should have traded the car in, but I never questioned the need to continue to belong to AAA.

                                  Cookbooks I have known and loved

I have three favorite cookbooks: Irene Kuo's The Key to Chinese Cooking, Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and the Better Homes and Gardens Grilling Cookbook. I highly recommend all three of these books.

The Italian Cooking book was recommended to me by my friend Anne (not her real name. It was a summer Saturday and we were chopping cabbage by hand for cole slaw using a recipe of Anne's that called for very finely minced slaw. It took a long time. In the course of our conversation, Anne mentioned that Marcella Hazan's cookbook (her first) had just been published and she was planning to purchase a copy. When she went to the bookstore, I tagged along. I love bookstores; my only problem with them is cutting down on the number of books I want to buy every time I go into one. This time I ended up with Classic Italian Cooking. I highly recommend the minestrone soup, another family favorite, the lentil soup, and the Chicken Cacciatore.

I no longer remember who pointed me towards The Key to Chinese Cooking. I love the book for its thorough explanations of each cooking technique and for the wonderful recipes. I especially love the Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage, a family favorite. Be sure to read the section on stir frying before making this dish.  A number of the recipes call for a technique called velveting for chicken. As I remember it, you coat the chicken in flour and drop it into boiling water (or hot oil) for a minute or two. You do this before adding the chicken to the stir fry. 
I always use water, not oil. In fact, I no longer deep fry anything, as I seem to be dangerous around large quantities of hot fat. 

For a couple of years after I first bought this book I made the red cabbage recipe using raddicchio. At the time, there were just me and J, my kids' father, to feed, and I was glad to find what I thought was such a small head of red cabbage. I took it home, chopped it up, and added to the frying pan -- we didn't have a wok -- at the appropriate time, along with the vinegar. In spite of the fact that the "cabbage" didn't turn quite the deep red the recipe said it would, the dish was delicious. After I discovered that I'd been using raddicchio, I looked for a recipe that actually called for it. I found only one, which said to treat it like endive.

"Well," I said to J, "If they can pretend it's endive, I can pretend it's red cabbage."

The grilling cookbook was a Mother's Day gift from my youngest son, CR. It was shortly after this that we had a week's vacation during which I was at home with just CR, and M, my partner's son.

The first day of vacation I asked the boys what they'd like for supper. This was usually an exercise in futility, but this time I struck gold.

"Let's make something from the cookbook," CR suggested. So the three of us sat down to pick out a recipe. I think the one we made that first night was "Plum Good Chicken." It was delicious. So were all the other recipes we tried, a new one each night that week. We liked the book so much, in fact, that we bought ourselves another copy to keep at our vacation home.

Left to myself, I admit, I'd never have picked up the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I'm too much of a cookbook snob. I'd have figured that a book like that couldn't possibly have any really good recipes. I'd have been wrong; I've never, in all the years I've been using the book, made a bad recipe from it. 

It just goes to show you shouldn't judge a book by its cover -- not even a cookbook.