My Mother, Ester Banegas Johnson, was born in Honduras 1927 and died in Alabama in 2003. She was a wonderful person, very thoughtful and full of life as well as a masterful cook and gracious hostess who used to sip sherry as she prepared dinner while listening to Jazz from the late 1940s, which was when she had attended Junior College in Perkinston, Mississippi. From her I learned about all sorts of tropical fruit and cuisine, flowers and ornamental plants, and the music of Louis Armstrong, Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Harry Belafonte, the Beatles, Bob Marley, and Willie Nelson, plus showtunes from Oklahoma to South Pacific to West Side Story to the Sound of Music. My first exposure to literature were the scores of paperback bestsellers that she had read, which lined a long shelf that wrapped around the staircase of one of our homes and was topped with small artworks acquired over the years and brass bowls of hard candy in Spring and Summer or walnuts in Fall and Winter. I also learned about Spanish Sherry and Chilean Wine from her—English cigarettes too, though we both pretended not to smoke. The thing I remember most about her was her laugh, which sounded like she had just been caught red-handed at something mischievous.
