As promised, here's another bit from Roger Angell's memoir Let Me Finish, this time a conjured memory of his mother, Katharine White, from the essay "Here Below":
?I don't envision her much at a younger best--slim and stylish at lunch with me in Schrafft's, around the corner from her office, in 1928, say--but instead find her sitting at the head of the dining-room table in North Brooklin, in her seventies, with her elbow on the table and her head wearily resting in one hand while she eats.[...] Late-August sunlight falls into the room, competing with the candles, and the usual homemade mint sauce and homemade piccalilli are in their usual silver dishes. I try to imagine which of her immediate deep concerns is topmost at the moment: whether the blue Chinese willow-pattern vegetable dish on the mantel behind her should be left to Alice, as written on her current and endlessly rewritten twelve-page adjunct-to-her-will list, or, for some complex reason, to Callie or perhaps to another granddaughter altogether, Kitty Stableford; how many of her nine grandchildren attended or will ever attend a school or college where they would get to learn their way around not just Middlemarch but Cranford, too; why the cosmos, some blossoms of which are in the arrangement she's put together this afternoon in the copper vase in the far-left corner of the living room, has been looking so leggy of late and whether the northwest bed, where the cosmos are, doesn?t need a wholesale cleanout and replanting this fall; whether Jean Stafford, the widow of Joe Liebling, was drunk again when she called last night or in the grip of something more dire; whether Edith Candage, in the kitchen, has remembered to get the dessert Floating Island egg white whipped to a proper firmness; whether poor Catharine Allen's failing eyesight will keep her from laundering and ironing those organdy curtains, come spring, and, if not, who in the world can be found to replace her; whether Joe, away at the moment on a cruise east to the Bras d'Or in his cutter Northern Crown, may encounter the tropical depression in the Caribbean mentioned on the radio tonight; whether Roger, never as lean as his father Ernest, hasn't picked up a bit of weight over this vacation with too much beer and too many lobsters and may be overloading his heart; why Ernest made me carry that enormous frying pan around my neck on our 1915 honeymoon camping trip, and so perhaps beginning the back troubles that have been killing me ever since; whether Vladimir Nabokov doesn't still have a couple of pieces of short fiction in him for the magazine, and whether the current fiction department is still regularly in touch with him and Vera, and how long has it been since I've had a letter, one of those "V.N." specials, from him; who that new person in checking is who last week crazily circled a phrase of Andy's on a galley and wrote "zeugma"? in the margin; whether Milton Greenstein will call us back tomorrow about the estimated September tax figures we've mailed him, and about Shawn's concerns about the paperback of the appalling Gill book; and isn?t it about time for seconds? (269–70)