My mother was pretty independent and taught us all how to cook and how to clean. After he retired even my Dad helped cook regularly.

Now that I think of it, Nikki Giovanni was a favorite of my German / Irish / Scots Irish mother. Nikki Giovanni spoke to my mother’s life of being a woman who had been silenced. My mother appreciated a young woman who spoke out so boldly. Still, my mother stopped writing short stories and poetry around 1968. I’m sure that “A Poem Off Center” spoke to her.

I remember seeing Nikki Giovanni on public television in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s and being strongly impressed by her presence but sensing that she was not speaking to me and that she would probably feel contempt for me, a timid young white woman with very low self-esteem.

She may have influenced me, though, to stop wearing make-up, to start writing poetry, to think of myself as an artist and to consider what it might mean that women of our generation had more options than our mothers and grandmothers had ever dreamed of, and it was certain that that truth didn’t make life as a woman any easier.

I can’t picture you wearing make-up and dressed as a housewife, loren. That your mother dressed you as a housewife says a lot about how different things were in 1951 and, for some reason, makes me think of the scene in the “Rebel Without A Cause” where the father of the James Dean character is wearing a woman’s apron.