It’s not soda in those cups.

That’s beer that my mother and I are drinking, five or six years ago, she then in her early 90s, while we were awaiting a table at the Clam Bar in Somers Point, NJ.

Mom left this mortal coil two-and-a-half years ago, and I sure miss her. She was tough but fair, an even-tempered German Lutheran woman with a good heart and a strong will and both a ready laugh and at times a bit of an edge.

She would feed anyone and everyone who came over. Feeding people was first nature to Mom. Her first question, always, to everyone, was, “Didja eat yet?” Because she would always feed you. As a child of both the Great Depression in her native Johnstown, Pennsylvania and that city’s Great Flood, both being times when not everyone had enough to eat, she learned early on that you shared. No matter who you were or where you came from, my mother would feed you. Over the years I brought many, many people over, most of them strange artistic types or fans of the outre or quasi-bohemians or just college misfits; she fed them all. She fed my father, we children, her grandchildren, all of our friends, neighbors who dropped by, anyone and everyone. Generally, she kept a tub of fried chicken wings in her refrigerator (these, she said, were “fer snackin’ “) but even if it looked like she had nothing to offer, she somehow whipped up something incredible out of thin air.

Like all good mothers, she knew the difference between real problems and whatever minor annoyances you, as a child, might be complaining about. Complaining and crying were actively discouraged; the lesson was that if you’ve got a problem, you should just deal with it. If you were a child and you fell down and hurt yourself, she offered a mild, “Let’s take a look at you. … Oh, you’re fine.” If you wanted to cry about it, you had to go cry on the steps — and the steps were outside. Where nobody, including her, would have to hear it.

She was a font of hard-earned clear-cut wisdom. When, at age 16, I had been out drinking with some young men several years older than I was, and had had far too much and had been vomiting all around the parking lots of the bars along Margate, New Jersey, one of the guys finally thought he should call my house to see what they should do. My mother answered, and when my friend Kevin told her that Lee had had a bit too much to drink, my mother’s answer was, “You took him out, you keep him.” Kevin wound up with me vomiting in his basement until I sobered up. Lesson learned for both of us.

When I was an oddball teen, reading things I shouldn’t have been reading and writing things just as outrageous and publishing little magazines far above the level of my maturity, and causing all sorts of trouble at school and going to big cities on my own, she had the foresight to just let me be, even when she found what might have looked like very rude cartoons in a zine I was publishing. Some parents would have swooped in, but hovering around wasn’t her style, and I remain grateful. I just wanted out of the constrained life of southern New Jersey and eccentric art seemed like a pathway and certainly an interest, and I guess she knew.

She also provided the very best advice ever given to me: “When you’re going out, always take a jacket, and always use the bathroom, because you never know.” To this day, I follow this, and I’m always glad.

I count myself very lucky to have had her as a mother; if you’re reading this, I hope you were half as lucky. She had a good heart, a strong sense of caring and service, and unmatched personal strength. The only reason she’s no longer with us is because she let go. Most people fear death; she decided it was her time and went toward it in her sleep, still physically well at age 98.

She may be gone, but the example she set lives on in her children and her grandchildren and their children. We’re all the better for it.

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