It's been 12 years since I released THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF MEXICO CITY. On the eve of Mexico's...
Gifts from my mother
My mother passed in October at age 95.
Although she’d been declining for some time and dementia had robbed us of who she really was, the loss still hit like a hammer blow.
Many of my writer friends know that I wrote the Galliano Club series during the pandemic, using the project to get her talking about positive things during our nightly phone call. With some prompting she would tell me about growing up in Rome, NY, in the Italian section known as East Rome. Her recollections fueled the creation of the fictional city of Lido and the East Lido Italian neighborhood.
She was a huge supporter of my second career as a mystery author, arranging me to speak to a woman’s club she belonged to and invited everyone she knew when I was inducted into the Rome Arts Hall of Fame in 2019. Even after dementia prevented her from reading, she kept a dog-eared copy of CLIFF DIVER in the storage compartment of her walker.
It fell to me to write her obituary. It started this way:
Marietta Jean (Sestito) Booton of Rome, known to all as Jean, passed in her 96th year. She leaves an enduring legacy of personal strength, steadfast perseverance, loyal friendships, and love of family.
There are many things I could say about my mother. That she was terrible at telling jokes, hated fast food, always set her table with cloth napkins, was the Class Treasurer of the Rome Free Academy Class of ’46 and enabled class reunions for 70 years. A single mother of 4 at a time when few women were. A financial whiz, an accomplished pianist, a standard shift driver who once owned a Corvair.
She insisted that we all go to college and we did. Three of us have advanced degrees.
She was firmly anchored in her home town of Rome, but loved to travel. When I was in college in Paris, she spent several weeks with me. When my spring break rolled around we took a bus tour through Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. She kept a record of the trip, which has sadly disappeared.
I particularly recall getting off the bus in Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber, a picturesque medieval walled village in West Germany (before the wall came down). An outdoor beer garden was right in front of us, so of course we had to absorb culture—as in have a beer right there and then. Having slaked our thirst we found our hotel. My mother made a beeline for the closet housing the toilet. She came out two minutes later giggling hysterically.
Apparently, the cubicle had a wooden board over the plumbing, set into the wall in a frame. Drunk on a single beer, my mother thought it was a mirror and couldn’t figure out why she looked so plain.
We staggered around the hotel room together, laughing until we cried.
I’ve lost my mother, but oh, how lucky I am.
My mother jean, around age 18.
Jean getting ready for her wedding, age 21.
Jean and children circa 1963. I’m the youngest in red.
