Back in Business/Stunning

Thanks to Brian, I have finally figured out what why my blog had disappeared.  The entry below is what did it.  For those who missed it, I am reposting. (Is there such a word?)

I always thought my mom was beautiful.  Doesn't every daughter.  She was tall and slender and elegant, all qualities that I a short and plump girl with a childish pixie haircut, hoped to grow into one magical day.  The same day I was going to miraculously lose my baby fat, grow six inches and morph into a younger version of my mother.

Many, many years later, still short but no longer plump and with a sophisticated version of that pixie haircut, I was in an elevator at the retirement community where my dad lived after my mother's death.  A woman standing near us recognized my dad and on discovering that I was his daughter turned to me and said with great conviction, "Oh, your mother was a stunning woman." As soon as she said it, I knew it was the best and truest way to to describe my mom.  Stunning.  The word set her apart from other women more conventionally pretty perhaps but lacking her distinctive style and natural sophistication.

Here's what a stunning woman looks like.  I see her first in an old photograph taken long before I was born.  She is posing for the camera on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, one foot resting on the rail behind her.  She is wearing a big shouldered coat, cinched tightly at her waist and holding a rectangular bag against her chest.  She stares into the camera without smiling and looks ever so smart and confident.  I like to think it was a boyfriend--maybe even my dad--who took that picture.
Then there is a photograph taken in Palm Springs where she and my dad spent their first year of marriage.  She is sitting, no slouching, on a diving board, her long slender legs dangling over the edge.  She is wearing a drapey, one piece bathing suit and looks lanquidly out to the camera.  I know her legs must be tanned.


And always there is the picture I have in my mind's eye.  I am a child sitting on the floor of her bathroom looking up at her most intently as she puts on her makeup for a Saturday night out.  She is wearing a black half slip and a strapless bra, looking wonderfully sex and glamorous to me.  Her makeup completed, I follow her to the bedroom where together we open her closet and carefully sift through the rack of dresses until she finds the right outfit for the evening. 

Did I hope that some of that magic would ever descend on me?  Perhaps that is why I always got dressed in my parents' room before a big date.  How different the image that came back to me when I stared into the full length mirror on her closet door.  There I was--a short, rounded but not attractive girl, a chubby Natalie Wood as a boyfriend once described me--cute but definitely not stunning.