Let’s hear it from the old gal herself: Glancing up as she edited one of my pieces on fashion history, she said, “You know what you lack? Uhm… gravitas.”

 

There it was. The family disappointment, trained to be the next Janet Yellen or, at the very least, ace financial reporter for the New Statesman, only had a hankering for pop culture and Rolling Stone magazine.

 

I suppose my mom, Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil, was ready to slit her wrists when I signed up for the lifestyle pages, but all she could manage at the time was, “Perhaps you should start as a cub reporter on the police beat, like I did.”

 

“Grimy precincts and corpses? Eeeew! I don’t think so,” I replied.

 

For the record, mom was a published author at age 6, a member of the fearsome College Editors Guild by her teens, a political columnist for several decades, whose output routinely won awards year in and year out, then a novelist and an author.

 

Was it Oscar Wilde who pointed out, that to be frivolous is not the same thing as trivial? Happy Mother’s Day, mom. This is as good as it gets!