A Special Tea Mug, A Special Friend

As daughters we sometimes don’t have the relationship with our mother’s that we think we should. I certainly didn’t. I can’t think of any of my close friends who did. I have a friend who has expressed wistfully that the relationship I had with her mother is one she never had. As it turns out her relationship with my mother is one that I couldn’t have. Her point of view of my mother is certainly one I didn’t share. We both had relationships with each others' mother that we could never or did never have with our own mothers, each of us having been somewhat envious of each other.

Mrs. Hegener passed away a few years ago. She was very special to me. Every time I pick up a certain tea mug I think of her and the place where I spent my formative years, Middle Village.

The tea mug has a particular shape. It feels right in my hand. It’s the cup with which I drink my coffee in the morning . I rarely drink tea anymore. I think of her daily.


Middle Village was the neighborhood which formed my strongest and most vivid memories. It was a Queens neighborhood which evolved from farms. It is surrounded by cemeteries and had many monument companies with large slabs of thick, grey granite. The monument companies are gone now ; the cemeteries remain. We used to play in the street, in the cemeteries and on those marvelous slabs of granite on which you could really slide well. We were blessed with backyards where we could capture bugs and dig holes. Some people had vegetable patches, and fruit trees. There were wash lines. Wet wash froze solid in winter. In the summer the mothers would sit on stoops and watch the kids play. We would hop the stoops and catch fireflies. There was no air-conditioning.

In the summer of my ninth year my family moved to Long Island. It was culture shock. People stayed in their neat houses with their neat lawns. There was nothing going on in the streets. I stopped using the word "ain't".

I always came back To M.V., first by Long Island Railroad and bus, and then I would drive. The Hegener girls and I would take off for adventures in Manhattan, ice skating in Central Park and later hitting the nightlife in the Village and Upper East Side. We had a lot of fun.

Years later, when I was looking to get assigned as a teacher to a school in Queens rather than the South Bronx I moved with my husband back to Middle Village. The Board of Education would always assign you to a school in the borough where you lived. I don’t know if that is true today. I always got home from school at about 3:30 in the afternoon. My first stop was at Mrs. Hegener’s where we would talk and have tea and coffee cake. I always used a particular tea mug. It was always the same mug. It was always milk and sugar; it was never lemon. We didn’t discuss politics or religion. Our views were diametrically opposed. Mrs. Hegener and I would talk about school, cooking and sewing. Mrs. Hegener was a great cook and seamstress and she would share recipes and sewing tips. We did this almost daily for about 4 years. She helped me make decisions, like my divorce. Divorce was something she was completely opposed to, but she supported me in that decision. She was my friend. She didn’t blame me when two of her daughters divorced their husbands not long after I divorced. She could have but she didn’t.

After a while I moved to the Upper East Side but I still stopped by, although, with less and less frequency. I would call. I switched jobs. I would always call. I always wanted her input on recipes most of which were not written down. I think I didn’t write them down on purpose so I could call for a recipe tune up. I remarried and moved to Florida but I would always call. There was always a recipe that I couldn’t quite remember. After a while she couldn’t quite remember them either. She became ill and moved to her son’s home in Albany.

I traveled to Albany to see her. Her recent memories had been snatched from her. She remembered me not as I was but as I had been some years before. She didn’t believe I was me and gave me the third degree. She was trying to believe that I was her friend. She grilled me on my family history trying to catch me at every turn. She was bewildered that I knew the answers to all her questions. I think she thought I was an alien planted by the CIA to somehow trick her. She checked my driver's license. she looked at me skeptically and would not accept the fact that I was me. That’s OK, she knew I was her friend but I just wasn't that person. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I wonder who that strange woman staring back is. I can understand her dilemma .

After Mrs. Hegener passed away her oldest daughter and my good friend asked me if there anything I wanted to remember her by. I said a tea mug. I wanted the tea mug that I used when we had our afternoon tea. There were plenty of tea cups but none of them were right. They were new. They were wrong. The old ones had been replaced. When I returned to Florida from the funeral I realized that I had the right tea mug all along and I had been using it for many, many years. There was always something about that mug that I felt comfortable with.

Goulash a la Mrs. Hegener

2 lbs cubed chuck, 1 large onion, Marsala wine or water (4 oz.), 1 small can tomato sauce (8 0z), 1 bay leaf, salt and pepper, 5 or 6 ginger snaps in ½ C. water.

Put fat in pan, brown meat a few cubes at a time, then add onion, then tomato sauce, bay leaf, salt and pepper and 4 oz of Marsala or water. Cover tightly and let simmer for 1 ½ hours. After finished add ginger snaps.