The Jet Set
Originally published, Zeitgeist – a blog
23 October 2018
The Jet Set
Or: How Little Mama Inspired Visions of a Glittering Future
When I was about 12, my grandmother and I were sitting in the sunroom playing Gin and chatting. Memories of the subject of our conversation — the what or, more likely, the who — is a long-dead casualty to time. What I do remember, though, is that the subject had taken me around to the idea of travel, of hopping on a plane and just being somewhere else. Wouldn’t that be a great life, I suggested.
“I always wanted to be a member of the jet set,” she replied.
Little Mama, as I called her, was my idea of glamour, European spelling intended. She was a stylish, fashion-forward business professional with a quick, wry wit and a blinding intellect. It’s not an exaggeration when I say she ranks among the smartest people I’ve ever met. She read constantly, voraciously, and promiscuously articles in Peopleand Plato’s Republic. When Vincent Bugliosi’s And the Sea Will Tell gave me nightmares of being sunk into the ocean in an ice chest, it was her copy I had read. And when I asked her about Ernest Hemingway, Little Mama passed me a well-loved copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Carlos Baker’s biography, Hemingway: A Life Story.
Once, an acquaintance at one of her frequent parties made an off-handed remark about how nice the complete set of Classics Club books looked on her shelves and, perhaps inadvertently, suggested they were there just for show. Another guest challenged the acquaintance pick a volume and quiz her, because, her friend assured, Ada was the only person in the place who had read the latest Danielle Steele novel and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The acquaintance declined the challenge.