My mom’s name is Tracy. Personally, I’ve had great luck starting conversations with, “I’m Tracy’s daughter.” To put it bluntly, I have a cool mom. Waiters swoon, teachers inquire, friends come over, stores go full V.I.P., boyfriends blink twice, colleagues ask, “Will she visit again?”
This is the fate of those introduced to Tracy. She could introduce herself to a Beanie Baby and it would still be enchanted. Are you a 12-year-old, begrudgingly in attendance at a grown-up party? You play piano? Oh, you draw? You have no interests whatsoever, but you’re an age represented with a cardinal number by which she can deduce your grade in school and go from there? When someone so classy asks about your sixth-grade homeroom teacher or what the hell your job title means or how you got that scar, best of luck not being chuffed to death.
Tracy makes you feel the thing that is being asked is really asked. She makes you hear the plain and pure intent to connect. Her questions suggest that there are things about you in which people should take interest. You might begin to wonder if there is something inherently important about being in sixth grade, something inherently important about being you.
I can assure you my mom is just as crazy as your mom. More crazy, though, is how often her verve and depth make me forget she’s just as crazy as your mom. Most of us can only dream of being so interesting that our family is not constantly aware of our crazy.
My mom’s ability to reach out, give you the spotlight, kill at cocktail hour, and, by God, hold up a conversation, is a source of endless luxury for my dad, sister, and me. Tracy rallies Trojan energy and presence for the everyday. Every day this generosity sets the bar. We also rely on her tight execution of social recon missions to bring home juicy gossip. Sorry, but even with this information, were she to chat you up, bless your heart, you’d still have no idea whether she was gathering intel. I’m kidding! I’m not!
The scientific community may wish to take note of the following eyewitness accounts chronicling Tracy’s unnatural I’m-with-her effect, presented over the years in an array of delightful social enigmas. A friend in middle school once got upset because I “had nice jeans and cool parents.” Forever in my mind is the visual of entering my high school’s lobby and seeing a solid semicircle of friends, neatly arced around my mom. When she visited me in London, my hungover flatmate was not wearing his contacts and introduced himself thinking she was my friend. Once at Round Swamp Farm, my mom asked one of the owners — several bites into a peach — how the peaches were. In response, she extended the peach to my mother, who finished it (R.I.P. pre-Covid spontaneity). My parents once befriended a flight attendant on a plane and had her over for dinner when they landed. (Reportedly not the same in-flight fun. Still.) At the old Della Femina, at my mom’s suggestion, a waiter named Joey agreed to wear for the rest of his shift my sister’s new purchase from Steph’s Stuff: a raspberry shower cap, with a green stem at the top like a beret.
My favorite, most enigmatic occurrence took place in the bathroom at the restaurant Rosa Mexicano on the Upper West Side. My mom and I entered just in time to see a mother holding her 1-year-old, bending to pick up a rogue baby shoe, and by mistake, lightly bonking the baby’s head on the basin. Her daughter screwed up her face, smeared with beans from lunch, and started crying. We helped comfort the baby, who abruptly fell silent, one giant, movie-magic-glycerin tear frozen on her face. Sitting on her mom’s hip, she stared wide-eyed, her bean-covered mouth agape, at my mom. Inch by inch, the beany baby leaned over the gap between the two women. She gradually raised her arms up toward my mom. The baby’s mother smiled, nonchalant, and casually passed her child to my mom, a stranger in the Rosa Mexicano bathroom. To the baby: I totally get it. To my mom: Happy birthday, you’ve been dazzling a long time.
Bella Lewis is a reporter at The Star.