Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul Read Free Page B

another patient. Later, I saw Bill sitting by the bed. He was holding Connie’s hand as she slept. The date was February 12.
    Two days later I walked down the hospice ward at noon. There stood Bill, leaning up against the wall in the hallway, staring at the floor. I already knew from the head nurse that Connie had died at 11 A.M.
    When Bill saw me, he allowed himself to come into my arms for a long hug. His face was wet with tears and he was trembling. Finally, he leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath.
    “I have to say something,” he said. “I have to say how good I feel about telling her.” He stopped to blow his nose. “I thought a lot about what you said, and this morning I told her how much I loved her...and loved being married to her. You shoulda seen her smile!”
    I went into the room to say my own good-bye to Connie. There, on the bedside table, was a large Valentine card from Bill. You know, the sentimental kind that says, “To my wonderful wife...I love you.”
    Bobbie Lippman

Mama’s Soup Pot
    There are too many treasures in life we take for granted, the worth of which we don’t fully realize until they’re pointed out to us in some unexpected way. So it was with Mama’s soup pot.
    I can still see it sitting on the stove in all its chipped white-and-blue-enameled glory, its contents bubbling, steam rising as if from an active volcano. When I entered the back porch, the aroma was not only mouthwatering but reassuring. Whether Mama was standing over the pot stirring with a long wooden spoon or not, I knew I was home.
    There was no recipe for her minestrone soup. It was always a work in progress. It had been so since her girlhood in the Piemonte mountains of northern Italy, where she learned its secret from her nonna (grandma), who had inherited it from generations of nonnas.
    For our large immigrant family, Mama’s soup guaran teed we would never go hungry. It was a simmering symbol of security. Its recipe was created spontaneously from what was in the kitchen. And we could judge the state of our family economy by its contents. A thick brew with tomatoes, pasta, beans, carrots, celery, onion, corn and meat indicated things were going well with the Buscaglias. A watery soup denoted meager times. And never was food thrown out. That was a sin against God. Everything ended up in the minestrone pot.
    Its preparation was sacred to Mama. To her, cooking was a celebration of God’s providence. Each potato, each shred of chicken was placed in the pot with grateful thanks. I think of Mama whenever I read Proverbs: “She gets up while it is still dark; she provides food for her family. . . Her children arise, and call her blessed.”
    At one time, however, Mama’s soup pot became a source of embarrassment to me, for I feared it would cost me a new friend I had made at school. Sol was a thin, dark-haired boy, and an unusual pal for me because his father was a doctor and they lived in the best part of town. Often Sol invited me to his home for dinner. The family had a cook in a white uniform who worked in a kitchen of gleaming chrome and shining utensils. The food was good, but I found it bland, lacking the heartiness of my home fare served from flame-blackened pots. Moreover, the atmosphere matched the food. Everything was so formal. Sol’s mother and father were polite, but conversation around the table was stilted and subdued. And no one hugged! The closest I saw Sol get to his father was a handshake.
    In our family, warm hugs were a constant—men, women, boys and girls—and if you didn’t kiss your mother, she demanded: “Whatsa matter, you sick?”
    But at that time in my life, all this was an embarrassment.
    I had known Sol would like to eat dinner at our house, but that was the last thing I wanted. My family was so different. No other kids had such pots on their stoves, nor did they have a mama whose first action upon seeing you enter the house was to sit you down with a spoon and