Never Too Late
(by Margie Goldsmith)
My mother was a photographer who studied with Walker Evans, an American photojournalist best known for his work documenting the Great Depression. Although she wasn’t a professional, I learned after her death that three of her photographs are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. (Unfortunately, I’ve never seen them because they are somewhere in storage.) She was also as strong as an ox despite having survived cancer three times. Perhaps her practice of daily meditation helped. I am a writer, triathlete, marathoner, and take pretty good photographs, but I don’t have the patience to meditate. The thing we shared the most was that neither of us cooked. She relied on TV dinners. I eat out or take out.
But recently I decided that it’s never too late to learn, so when I heard about a company that offered truffle cooking classes via Zoom, I signed up, choosing the easiest class I could think of: truffle lobster roll. My mother died before people had personal computers, but I doubt she would have ever signed up for a Zoom cooking class because there was not one strand of technical DNA in her entire body. When I once bought her a cassette recorder so she could listen to meditation tapes, she never could figure out which button to push.