The Glenna Aimee Boroson Memorial

25. Smoked Turkey sandwiches

26. Roast Beef sandwiches

27. KFC & Popeye’s Chicken. During her final months at the facility, Mom had great difficulty maintaining her caloric intake. She was on antibiotics which made most of her favorite foods taste bad or just have no taste at all, and she was the sort of person who would not eat rather than eat something she disliked. One of the things she found still tasted great were chicken tenders and drumsticks from Popeyes and KFC, and I would pick up buckets of these every few days en route to the facility by taxi, and some mashed potatoes too. I couldn’t have any because of food allergies, so any which she couldn’t finish off on the second day (reheated at the facility microwave) she would give to the most poverty-stricken nurse’s aides and staff. I was always trying to get her to eat more, as she’d lost so much weight– but she could not help but reach out to others and extend her generosity, even in her final days.

28. Honey mustard dressing. Which she would put on the chicken tenders, and salads. One of her signature flavors.

17. Perspective in drawings and paintings. One of the first things Mom would teach students was how to draw perspective, with lines intersecting at the horizon. It was also her biggest pet peeve in artists and students– to get perspective wrong. I never really learned much from her as an artist, but this is one I could not help but absorb.

18. Color theory. Another one of Mom’s basics. The blending of red blue and yellow. It’s also why I can identify extremely obscure colors and pigments by sight, but never quite as well as she — of course. And know that beige is not actually a color, nor is black.

19. Independence. Mom was always afraid that people– even at times me– were going to take her freedom away from her. She loved the fact she could just hop in her car and go for a drive, even though she didn’t like driving. She enjoyed being spontaneous and whimsical, even playful at times. She may have had the body of a 69 year old at the end, but she always had the soul of a twelve year old. Or maybe nine. She was always the first to admit this.

20. Personal Dignity. I remember how she would hide the handicapped parking hook in the glove compartment until she was far from the house. She didn’t want people to know she was in any way enfeebled. (But boy, she used those privileges every chance she could!) And during her final months, when she most urgently requested I bring her most flattering clothing from home and her favorite shampoo, conditioners and makeup. She wanted to seem as strong as radiant as she could, especially under the circumstances.

13. Diet Pepsi. Not caffeine free. Not cherry. Not full calorie. Never Coke. Mom was quite specific. She drank Diet Pepsi or Twinings Darjeeling tea, and occasionally Twinings English Breakfast blended with Darjeeling, and every decade or so, Nestea iced tea. She seldom drank wine or any alcohol. Mom only drank water if there were no alternative. She felt that if you drank water, it might as well be from a trough along with the animals. To drink water meant you were at the bottom rung of poverty, and had to be homeless and unable to afford a sip of old warm soda. She found my liking for spring water utterly baffling. Having to wash down her pills with Faygo or water during her final months alive were humiliating to her, and downright gross.

14. Sensodyne Toothpaste. Mom had an endless array of dental problems and complaints, and she had countless fillings and root canals. She would always note that I should be grateful I hadn’t inherited that gene from her! 

15. Me getting on television. She was immensely proud of the fact that I’d appeared (well, my voice had appeared) in an episode of Paranormal State. She showed it off to everyone. I was surprised a bit that she wasn’t appalled by the topical material, but I came to realize she’d developed a fascination for psychic and ghost related television shows. Even though she felt that it bordered on religious transgression, merely wondering about the afterlife was not harmful– and finally my life’s work had achieved some sort of recognition.

16. Siamese cats, and cats in general. Cats, cats, cats. At one point she’d had twenty. All through my life. And every place in the house she put kitty kitsch. Photos of kittens and cats, sculptures and paintings and drawings– some purchased, but many of her own creation. Everywhere. The kitchen wall is a shrine– something like twenty framed pictures of cats on one wall alone. In the time since her passing I’ve reflected and have come to think that she saw cats as beautiful things, so immensely and innately beautiful that every appearance of them in a room lit it up with beauty like a light. Looking at a picture of a cat brightened her mood, so she surrounded herself with them. It most definitely seemed weird, but in retrospect I’m glad she found inventive ways to bring delight and enchantment to her life.

9. Police procedurals and 10.Detective stories/Mysteries.

Mom virtually dropped her interest in horror in the final several years of her life in favor of pulp mysteries and cop shows. For some reason the ghoulish aspects of horror began to unsettle her, but the cadavers of CSI and bullet wounds of NYPD etc did not. Sue Grafton and dozens of other writers fill the shelves in her rooms. She read everything by Agatha Christie; that’s a given– and so many others.

5. Mom had a truly morbid, sarcastic humor. She was seldom cruel, but she savored irony, sarcastic, gallows humor– things inappropriate, but just barely within the realms of good taste. Not coarse or earthy so much, but definitely twisted. I get a lot of my humor from her.

6. Christopher Lee. Mom had a lifelong crush on actor Christopher Lee. She thought he was the quintessential Dracula, and admired the fact that offscreen he was a literate, charming gentleman, and a great musician as well.

‎7. Vampire movies. Mom was a huge fan of vampires on screen. It probably started with Dark Shadows, but extended itself through the Hammer Films catalogue and all of its many copycats. It was scary, but also kind of sexy too. Hammer Horror was played on the household televisions as early as I can remember, and I was doodling monsters in my notebooks as early as age 8 or 9. She never thought anything was wrong with me absorbing it osmotically, but it surely had a huge influence on my tastes. Even today in the house, amidst all the kitty kitsch and still lives of fruit baskets and family portraits, there are vampire movie postcards and vampire paintings up on the walls amongst them.

8. Movies in general. I’ve come to recognize this was a family tradition, stronger than other families. When my uncle died he left me with a rather stupendous VHS collection of films in 1985, and during the last gathering at Mom’s bedside of his elder brother and his wife along with me– most of our conversation was a game Mom proposed, to discuss all our favorite movies. I was actually an adult before I actually went to a movie in a theater on my own, so closely associated it was with a family activity. Movies were outings, to be shared and talked about on the ride home or even for days after. During Mom’s final ten years I would often entertain her by playing her movies I downloaded via iTunes or TiVo’d or from my DVD library– a to-watch list for her which will never be completed. Films brought us closer, gave us a common language, gave us things to discuss, a deeper bond. Shared films were just as important as the family dinner. One of the first things I did after she died was buy a whole stack of DVDs of movies and television she enjoyed. They’re now sitting on top of the television in her room, and I spend nearly every day watching a bit of them in a chair at the foot of her bed, as if I could just turn around and look back and see her reclining there with a remote and a bag of potato chips. But she’s not there; at least not in a physical sense. I wish I could still hear her comments and insights. But it’s just silence, and the films go on without her. I hope I can find some of her in the things she loved.

1. She liked the movie adaptions of the Stieg Larsson trilogy, though she never got around to reading the books. That was atypical for her– but she loved stories of sleuthing and also stories with themes of justice.

2. She was an obsessive fan of Sherlock Holmes in the original stories– and the Basil Rathbone depictions on screen. (She was disappointed with Cumberpatch.)

3. Makeup. So much makeup. Not so much on her face, but a large bathroom in the house largely taken up by it, which I am slowly throwing away. As an artist she was an illustrator and a painter, and she used that obsessive perfectionism on the canvas of her face as well.

4. Big sunglasses, huge, 70s style. The kind that make the wearer look like they have insect eyes. I can’t look at them in movies without thinking of her– they were one of her signature items.