Because they know how much I love to write, family members and friends have, over the years, asked when I'm going to start my novel. The plain fact of the matter is that I have no interest in writing a novel. If I did, though, I would have to tackle that subject which has previously fascinated so many novelists -- and write about my mother. In fact, I would have to write several novels because I don't think I could fit her into just one volume.

How to phrase this? My mother is a colorful woman. She has a delicious sense of humor, complemented by a laugh that fills the room. She has more common sense than anyone has a right to, and has been known to dispense it, unasked for, to anyone in her sights. She is the Empress of the Excursion, known hither and yon as the one who will figure out who should go in what car on even local forays, with great care being taken to avoid having to take more than one car -- quite a feat in a family peopled with long-legged complainers. My mother's talent for assigning car seats (and its companion talent, deciding who sits where at dinner, for which she should rightly be known as the Tsarina of the Table) is so pronounced that several years ago, my father took to calling her Ike -- as in General Eisenhower. My mother makes Ike look like a piker.

Jane Webster Green grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and was known within her own family as "the little Itralian baby" (yes, the "r" is intentional and is just the way her father happened to say it). Because she has no Italian blood whatever, this compliment always tickled her parents, coming as it did from an Italian neighbor who admired my mother's cap of dark, glossy curls. The hair was matched by a pair of huge dark eyes, brown in truth but so beautifully dark that most people think they are black. My mother's father ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress in 1930, and his father was the first surgeon ever to operate (successfully) to remove a cancerous tumor. My mother's mother was a gorgeous, petite farm girl whose father designed and built splendid toys and dollhouses from scratch, and whose mother was a distinguished painter, sculptor, and potter. There was an ancestor colorfully named Amnita, somewhere centuries back, who was so demanding and cruel to her household help that they poisoned her. From such fertile ground sprang my mother.

From her photo albums, it's easy to tell that this is a girl who likes to have a good time. Jane Green -- "Gangrene," as she was sometimes called by rude elementary school classmates -- had scads of boyfriends, many of whom appear in stiff black-and-white poses in the photo albums of her youth. I can never keep them straight: the prim, bespectacled fellow who looks as though he'd grow up to be a research biologist turns out to have been all "Russian hands and Roman fingers," while the one who has all the earmarks of a member of Future Convicts of America was actually an especially nice guy.

Interspersed among the beaux are photos of my mother having a high old time with a gaggle of girlfriends. Here's my mother whooping it up, standing bare-legged and knee-deep in what looks like a swamp, her face helpless with laughter. Here she is looking for all the world like Gene Tierney's younger sister, sultry in some taffeta, cloaked confection, impatient to dance. There she is on the beach during one of her many summers of waitressing, her wonderfully freckled cheeks turned up to the sun, a kerchief holding back that glossy hair.

My father is in none of these albums. They had scarcely known each other three weeks when he proposed -- most inconveniently, it turns out, as my mother was at the time engaged to someone else. Poor Fiancé No. 1 was in Europe at the time, having foolishly given my mother permission to date casually -- just so she wouldn't be completely lonely, you understand -- until he returned to the States.

Anyway, my mother thought my father was kidding when he proposed, and laughed. Not kidding at all, he took offense and then took off. Tears, recriminations, some kissing, some making up, and an eventual engagement followed. A Dear John letter was promptly dispatched to Fiancé No. 1, and the wedding plans were underway. In the three-month interval between engagement and wedding, my mother broke the engagement seven times, and then consented to go through with it only after the engraved invitations had arrived (ever commonsensical, she thought it would be foolish to let such an expensive item go to waste).

My parents celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary in 1998. Their acquaintance at the time of their wedding was so brief that my mother didn't know one of the most fundamental facts about my father: he hates fruitcake. The depth of his feelings on the matter makes other people's jokey references to fruitcake look lightweight and banal. Their wedding cake, as it turns out, was fruitcake, a traditional choice prepared from scratch by my maternal grandmother (who, while delighted about the wedding, was less than thrilled to have only a couple of months to let the fruit soak in rum, as opposed to the full year she usually counted on). I have it on good authority that my father gagged and backed away at the reception when my mother offered him the traditional bite of wedding cake, not knowing that as far as he was concerned, this food was an instrument of torture and not something to be offered lightly to a loved one.

My mother must certainly be the only American over the age of one who has never eaten at a McDonald's. Let me amend that: she has never even set foot inside a McDonald's, nor has she ever gone through their drive-thru window. Nary a McDonald's fry or burger has passed her lips, and in fact, when I stopped by a McDonald's once with her in the car -- just to get a drink! -- she clung to the car door and demanded to be taken elsewhere. She has informed all of us that this feat of lifelong non-McDonald's-partaking should be inscribed on her tombstone. It should be noted that her adamance on this point is not due to health concerns, nor is it because she fancies herself a gourmet; she has eaten at other fast food restaurants, and doesn't seem to have anything against the genre itself. She shuns McDonald's mostly because she is contrary and stubborn and wants to be different from the pack, traits I seem somehow to have inherited myself.

There you have a couple of food tales; let me tell you another. My parents were at a tennis match several years ago, when the young couple in front of them began to unpack a picnic lunch. Out of a canvas bag came drinks, sandwiches, chips, and grapes still in the green Styrofoam container from the supermarket. My mother watched all this with a cool eye, and then decided to employ a cruel but successful technique from her many years of child-rearing: ask the question to which you already know the answer, then pounce. Her opening gambit was deceptively mild: "Excuse me. Have you washed those grapes?"

The couple looked at my mother, and then at each other. "Of course we have!" replied the man.

My mother leaned forward in triumph. "No, you haven't," she said. "Those grapes are still in the Styrofoam the supermarket put them in. Those grapes have not been washed." The man looked at his wife, who helplessly had to admit that my mother was right. Not satisfied that the couple fully understood the gravity of eating unwashed grapes, my mother continued, "Let me tell you something. When I worked as a cropduster, we sprayed things on the grapes that would curl your toenails. Why, the pesticides we used . . . " Who knows where it went from there, except that my mother was off doing storytelling barrel rolls, with my father awestruck in her wake.

Yet another food tale comes to mind. Years ago, we were having dinner at our house with the Dawsons, dear family friends. At the time, we had a dog named Pepper. We were having steak that night, and Mother and Aunt Gretchen Dawson were busy in the kitchen getting dinner ready. Trying to get some of the five kids out from underfoot, my mother whirled around at one point and handed CeCe Dawson and me a plate brimming over with thick, raw steaks. "Here," she said briskly. "Go feed this to Pepper." Then she was gone, back into the whirl of kitchen activity.

A smarter child might have pointed out this obvious mistake to her mother, but I was not that child. I was the perpetual question-raiser, the one who never did as I was told on first try, but on this particular occasion, I decided to abandon my usual modus operandi and simply do as I was bid. CeCe and I looked at each other briefly, then marched off to the garage with a feast for Pepper, the likes of which she had not seen before or since.

Perhaps ten minutes later, my mother was frantically searching for the plate of steaks, assuming she had given us the plate with the trimmings of fat and gristle. When we told her, grave-faced but light-hearted, where the steaks were (and best of all, that they were there at her express instruction), her dismayed response was, "Pepper? Pepper was the furthest thing from my mind!" Though Pepper has long since met her maker, some of us in the Dawson and Vodrey families still employ that line when anyone at the table asks for the pepper.

You hear the term "really unique" bandied about these days as though it were grammatically correct (it's not) and as though it were true (rarely). But really unique pretty much perfectly describes my mother. Here is a woman who went through several cycles of working in a hometown bank til she'd saved up enough money, then zipping off to Europe to gad about freely until the money ran out. Here is a woman who adores a good dirty joke, but is mortally offended when other women show up hatless in church. Here is a woman who paints the inside of her linen closet blue, convinced in her heart of hearts that this helps keep her damask tablecloths as white as possible.

My mother may sound, from these tales, like an unwieldy package of eccentricities, and that she is. She is tough as nails and egg-fragile (she cries at TV commercials if they're sappy enough). She is forward-thinking and unsentimental, yet on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated, she woke up my siblings and me -- ages eight, six and three -- and sat us up to listen to the radio reports of his death because she wanted to imprint on our minds the gravity and importance of the moment. She can hold a grudge with the best of them, but she has the biggest heart around. She infuriates me, yet her compliments are the ones I long for most. She is a complex, surprising bit of human nature, all rolled up into one person with the darkest eyes I know of, and the only person in the world with more freckles than me. I just adore her.

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