On Thanksgiving day 1963, my father and I were in People’s Drug Store at DuPont Circle, in Washington, D.C. The store hushed as the radio blurted out President Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation that Florida’s Cape Canaveral would now be known as Cape Kennedy. (Ten years later the Floridians changed it back.) I was visiting my father on break from my third high school, Walsingham Academy, in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Washington sputtered in the aftermath of the assassination – its only crowds advanced to JFK’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. At seventeen and without a driver’s license I capitalized on my father’s somber distraction to hone my driving skills using his Cadillac to visit friends who were also home for the holiday. I learned to navigate Rock Creek Parkway, the notoriously confusing Pierre L’Enfant circles, Key Bridge and Pennsylvania Avenue. I knew to stay in the northwest part of the city, that there was something sinister in southwest, southeast, and northeast Washington. I cruised by the white-brick colonial home on Foxhall Road that I’d occupied with my parents and two sisters in the early ’50s, before my parents’ drinking turned us all into gypsies and eventually landed us in the Chicago suburbs.

The next time I visited Washington, I was with my second husband and my son, 9-year-old Joe, for Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inauguration. Carter took the oath of office in 28-degree weather with the Bible opened to the defining passage, Micah 6:8: “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” I remembered enough geography to land a handy parking spot, and after the ceremony we wound our way around the Capitol to the National Gallery of Art, for the nation’s first blockbuster museum exhibit, King Tut.

Sixteen years later I moved from Chicago to Washington to work in the Clinton administration. My cousin Therese with her children, Peter and Melissa, visited often from their home three hours away in New Jersey, sometimes at the drop of a hat: “Therese, if you can get down here tomorrow afternoon, we can go for a tour of Air Force One!”

One summer Peter was one of the lucky few 12-year-olds to be accepted as an intern in the Smithsonian Institution’s summer camp. It was across the street from where I worked at the Department of Education. He freewheeled around the museum in the afternoons before we drove home together. In the evenings he briefed me on where to find Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St.Louis and Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat.

My trips to the capital city are infrequent these days. When my grandchildren, C.J. and Kirby, were 10 and 12, we flew from Chicago and braved the 20-degrees with 1.8 million others for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.

Two years ago Peter retrieved me from the Washington Hilton in his new car, a spiffy bronze Fiat. He’d been working in Washington after a stint in the Peace Corps. He drove through Rock Creek and around the neighborhoods–Adams-Morgan and DuPont Circle–pointing out all his favorite spots, just as he had 20 years earlier, as if he were my guide to places I’d never been.

After she left my father, my mother made valiant efforts to sit her four daughters down to dinner every night. We never ate before eight o’clock unless we were at someone else’s house. Agnes Donnelly Ryan Burke was very continental and thought it ignoble to eat before the evening news was over. Most of her recipes, clipped from the New York Times, required long simmering or baking times to suit her cocktail hour, which often lasted until nine o’clock. I didn’t mind eating late because I rode my bike around town with the neighborhood boys after their dinners and before mine. I did my homework while watching the late news and The Tonight Show with Agnes.

       Agnes’ beef stew was extravagant. She would not permit anyone to call it Irish stew because, “Everyone knows the Irish have lousy taste and can’t cook.” Neither would she admit that it was really her version of the Times’ Boeuf Bourguignon. Her process would begin with a cast iron frying pan for searing the two-inch cubed sirloin pieces in hot bacon fat. She’d remove the meat and clean the frying pan to sauté the sliced onions, mushrooms and carrots in butter. The two most important ingredients, the hard-to-find dried bay laurel leaves and the bottle of red wine, were added to the meat and vegetables along with salt, pepper, thyme, allspice and garlic cloves. All of this simmered in the Revere Ware stock pot while Agnes sat in her favorite spot on the couch with her Scotch Old Fashioned to watch the news. 

       When the saucy aroma started permeating the house around seven o’clock she’d stir the pot, turn off the stove and return to the living room to visit with her boyfriend, Harry, and various teenage boys who’d stop in with their illegal six-packs of beer to impress us all with their funny stories. About half-past eight she’d skim the fat off the ragout, heat it up, add thickener and a few more ounces of wine, and we’d all sit down to dinner.

       I can’t remember how old I was when Agnes started cooking with wine. It became fashionable in the 1950s long before Julia Child’s TV show–probably after the war. I overheard Agnes extolling the virtues of cooking with wine “rather than cheap cooking sherry” on long-distance telephone conversations with her sisters as they swapped recipes. She added wine to chile con carne, shrimp newburg, gravy, beef stroganoff and spaghetti sauce. As we got older, she added more and more wine. No one complained except the occasional guest who had not been as inculcated in fine dining as my sisters and I.

      After I moved from Agnes’ home I used her recipes but had to resort to the economical “cheap cooking sherry” for my own family. The more I used, the better the food tasted. I gave up cooking with sherry when I joined Alcoholics Anonymous at age 29. Soon thereafter I gave up cooking altogether. I’ve been chasing after my mother’s cooking ever since.