Last week I had a phone interview with a woman who, at the end of our call, said she knew my parents. I didn't remember her, but she recounted the many cocktail parties and events at which she socialized with them.

We're talking a lifetime ago, when my mother was younger than I am now and, by all accounts, a literary dynamo. The woman on the phone detailed the annual "Bean Soup" festivals, when they all got together in Tewksbury, New Jersey to drink, make gallons of navy bean soup, and write and record radio plays on a big old reel-to-reel. There were also annual Halloween parties, and I have photos somewhere from the year my parents dressed as Czar Nicholas and Alexandra (the feature film and my dad's Grizzly Man beard probably serving as the inspiration).

It was the 70s and, if I hear people talk about my parents, I think of "The Ice Storm." As kids we were sometimes permitted to attend events, like the annual Christmas Tree Hunts, and I remember it to be very much like that. And Lee's film also does a great job of depicting adult lives separate from their children, a parenting "style" gone by way of the AMC Pacer.

Needless to say, it was a strange phone call. It isn't often that I meet people who knew them both together.

There is nothing I can say about my mother that will make her more special than anyone else's. What makes her exceptional is that she died young. What I mean by this somewhat morbid association is best described in Hope Edelman's Motherless Daughters: "Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as by those who stay." Other memoirs I like on the subject are Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being and NPR correspondent Jackie Lyden's Daughter of the Queen of Sheba.

Virginia Woolf: "She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life...But can I get any closer to her without drawing upon all those descriptions and anecdotes which after she was dead imposed themselves upon my view of her?"

And the longer they are gone, the more their image becomes myth.

The woman on the phone was remembering my mother's specter, the one I remember best and draw from most in my own life. I've read some of those radio scripts that my grandmother keeps in an envelope and they are brilliant--inspired by and possibly on par with Nichols and May. Analysis and facts aside, it is this groovy 1970s party girl, intellectual, professor's wife that inspires me most in my social life. It would only be another decade of increased domesticity, depression and parenting drollness before she would die. The image of her as a mother is much less distinct to me although it seems she did a pretty good job.

Tonight I am hosting my first dinner party on Walnut Street! At the height of any such evening--when the candles are burning down, the music is louder, and everyone is engaged in lively conversation--I look over the room and wonder if the scene unfolding in front of me is anything like the theme parties my parents and their friends once organized with great care and enthusiasm. I feel warm from the thought and secretly hope that my star is shining as bright as my mother's.

I had a second interview with the same woman yesterday in person. When she walked into the room, I instantly noticed in her expression a mixture of alarm and amusement. She kissed me, even though in my mind we had never really met. Before she sat down to begin our meeting, she looked straight into my eyes and said, "You look just like your mother."