(Headline, San Francisco Chronicle,
Bite Curious newsletter, 10/20/26)

•••

Before she was my mother, she was young
in the early 1950s, raven-haired,
smoking slim cigarettes,

drinking dry martinis after she migrated
to California because that’s what young
folks did before they strapped on

marriage and parenthood and mortgages
and partners who would eventually
disappoint them.

I doubt that she could’ve recalled when
she switched from martinis to wine—
jug wine in the Gallo days,

then to slender bottles of white zin,
and in her final years to Moscato—
long after he was gone, when she was

far more lonely than she let on,
when she confided that she’d not
had a friend—a real friend—

since Carolyn died, decades earlier.
And I ached for her then, she who
needed sips of sweetness each day,

she who’d encouraged me to approach
kids on the playground and ask if
they wanted to play.

“And if they don’t,” she’d say,
“find someone else,” which, in my
fortunate lifetime, has led to a swath

of humanity I think of as friends—
even ones I haven’t seen in decades.
And I lift my metaphorical martini

to those who bump me to the surface
when I need to breathe, and to her,
whispering, “Cheers, Mom.”