A Father and Daughter, Forging a Belated Bond
By Wanda E. Fleming, Special to The Washington Post Monday, April 7, 2008; C08
It's 3 a.m. and it's raining, the kind of rain that stabs the pavement with noisy diagonal needles. The telephone rings. This should be a horror movie but it's not.
The voice on the line is my father's, and my father does not use the phone. That is my mother's province. He is shy, and throughout my childhood I rarely saw him call anyone. "It's bad," he says. "Mom had a heart attack." It's a month before my parents enter their 45th year of marriage; my mother is dead.
Though ultimately she was the tiniest person in our family of towering members, my mother was clearly the most formidable. Think of the dignified beauty of Clair Huxtable, the nerve of Donald Trump and Joan of Arc's will, and you have the picture. My mother once confided she had wanted to fly fighter planes as a teenager. She held a college degree at a time when few women even attended. Her curtains were starched white, her lemonade made fresh from lemons we rolled across the wooden cutting board together. And late at night, curled up with her Shakespeare or a presidential biography, she smoked cigarettes, lots of them....
Continue here. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/06/AR2008040601912_pf.html
