My glamour analysis

Today I finished my marking and filed my marks for the course I taught online during lightning strikes, travel between countries, and being in the hospital etc. I can't really believe I pulled this off and the fact that I could without any student awareness says more about them than about me. Probably was dumb to try but this only demonstrates once again that I am just lucky.

Listen I really appreciated the comments left about glamour.

I started out thinking that the word meant smoking with a cigarette holder and lame turbans, and other things you don't see in my sitting-on-the-steps-drinking-coffee kind of neighborhood.

But this weekend I heard the mother of an old friend had passed away and I thought Mrs. Mowat, the original Babs, and actually the original everything, was glamorous. It was that touch of something just pushing a bit of style here and there.

When I first knew her she had black hair with a white stripe at one side (done ever month with her two daughters helping), she wore pearls with shorts, once held a wedding reception in her garage draped with sheets and always had silver napkin rings on the table. She was casual and classy at the same time. She looked you, and life, in the eye.

When her husband died suddenly and young she said "what the hell, those were 20 great years."

She knew quality but not snobbery. She answered the phone "Doris domestic speaking" and she was the first adult I ever heard use the F word, during ironing while watching the Watergate trial.

She was always elegant.

Nothing her kids ever did shocked her and when they realized this they generally straightened out.

She made creme brûlée and cocktails. She had a dressmaker make my plus sized friend winter coats because "you have to have fit and we're paying for it."

She knew a lot of trouble in her life but all I can remember are the wisecracks.

And that hair.