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Mother’s Day 2010
By
Published: Apr 28, 2010
Category:
Beyond Classification
I’ve resisted Mother’s Day for decades. And I’ve been right to — the idea of ancestor worship was muscled aside long ago by Big Business. Now the day is about flowers, chocolate and greeting cards.
These past few years, I’ve been softening. My mother is now 93, with all her marbles intact. She spends her time on the computer well — she’s been places on the Web I’ve never thought to go. And she’s pretty much memorized the Wall Street Journal before I wake up. Find a cool gift for her — hey, why not?
My mother’s life experience suggests that moms aren’t what they used to be. Which makes gifting more difficult on Mother’s Day — or any. So I looked through the HeadButler.com archives for presents that aren’t featured in store windows or online promotions. I could have chosen more; I stopped at 20. Hope these work for you…..
BEAUTY
Women who use it swear by it. Mom may never need to visit a dermatologist again. In fact, she may never need another facial.
It’s just olive oil, bee’s wax, honey, bee pollen, royal jelly and bee propolis. And the combination is indeed magic. Burns, scrapes, skin irritations, diaper rash, sunburns, eczema, psoriasis — it’s the go-to cream.
No more bad hair days — ever. The T3 dries your hair 50-60% faster than your current dryer. The negative ions generated by the T3 add seal moisture in your hair.
The negative ions flatten your hair, essentially eliminating frizz. What more do you want?
TOYS
The guy drives. The guy takes the pictures. The guy…. Hey, enough of the guy! Even the most butterfingered mom can make great videos with this super-simple, iPod-sized camera. Shoot, push it into your computer, hit SEND, be a hero — I mean: heroine.
Great that Mom has an iPod. Not great that she’s using the lousy earphones Apple bestows on iPod buyers. Give her the sound that the musicians made, the sound professionals hear — because Shure earphones bring Mom into the recording studio.
ANALOG
It doesn’t get more old-fashioned than this. Moleskines have a leather-like cover, an elastic band to keep the notebook closed, an inner pocket to hold business cards, acid-free paper. Now all she needs is a fountain pen….
MUSIC
In 1968, young Van Morrison made a gorgeous, legendary album. Forty years later, he recreated it at the Hollywood Bowl. Improved it, actually — as he sings, “I believe I’ve transcended.”
Thirty-seven of opera’s greatest hits, performed by singers you’ve actually heard of. One hundred and forty-eight artfully remastered minutes of music, on two discs, for about the price of a single opera CD.
Mom knows the classic hits. "Spirit in the Dark" is a neglected masterpiece from 1970 — marked by Aretha’s astonishing piano playing on ten of the album’s dozen songs.
Jazz. Such a dangerous category. But if there’s jazz the world agrees on, it’s Herbie Mann’s live album, recorded in 1962. An antique? No way! This is music for dinner, parties, the late-night rendezvous. Cerebral it ain’t — Mann finds a groove and rides it, toying with it just enough to keep you leaning in.
Mom may know Mary Chapin’s ‘90s hits. She probably doesn’t that, three years ago, a pulmonary embolism laid Mary Chapin low. Ironically, illness deepened the writing of a singer who already knew how to go deep. Her new CD, “The Age of Miracles,” is the work of a mature woman who can still locate her ideals.
PRINT
In 1928, Colette was just coming off the huge success of three sexy novels. “Break of Day” is many things, but above all, it’s a love letter from Colette to her mother, in which she asks a remarkable question: Who obsesses a woman most — her mother or her man?
Diana Vreeland was a character-and-a-half. “Pink is the navy blue of India,” she said. “Wash your blond child’s hair with dead champagne,” she suggested. “The bikini is the most important invention since the H-bomb,” she announced. Here she tells her life story. Is it true? Who knows? Or cares: This version is too much fun.
Women adore Kelly Corrigan. She’s got a husband and kids and a mother and breast cancer, and she writes about it all in a way that — in just 84 pages — destroys distance between reader and writer. “I am your mother, the first mile of your road,” she writes to her kids. “This was my dream. You were my dream.”
Moms pay attention to price in the supermarket. They notice “organic” food can cost more, and they pass it by. Nina Planck has an old-fashioned belief in whole milk, chicken with the skin on — the food our parents grew up on. And that just might get Mom on the path to a better diet.
The breakout fiction champ of 2009 — a debut novel so beloved the publisher’s not rushing to bring out the paperback. It’s set in Jackson, Mississippi, the characters are young white Southern women and their African-American maids, and the year is 1962. Don’t let Mom be the last woman in America to read it.
Scott. Zelda. Ernest. Cole Porter. Stravinsky. Picasso. Sara and Gerald Murphy knew them all. And everyone wanted to know them — they were young and rich and golden. She wore pearls on the beach. He painted. Ah, the ‘20s, when life could be art.
Wendy Burden is a Vanderbilt, which spells major money and absentee parenting. In this eye-opener of a memoir, she portrays a mother no one would want — or want to be. Her father? A suicide. Supervised by “servants”, she pretty much her own fun. And, along the way, tore up her childhood.
They’re not savvy because they’re rich, but because they know not to serve overly fancy food. The soups here are simple and toothsome. There are no fewer than 15 casseroles, including a mac-and-cheese punched up with dry mustard. And meat loaf — yes, these women live in the real world.
Parents, lovers/husbands, children. Sharon Olds deals mostly — I could almost say: deals only — with the big topics “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell you about it,” she writes at the end of a poem about her parents, and that’s the strength of her work; it’s just the facts she thinks you need, plus her take on them. Mom will recognize what she has in common with her.
