Back in the day. Ma Bell was the only phone company and airlines were monopolies as well, with the prices such that you dressed your best to get on a plane: it was an event, a sit-down dinner, a place to feel privileged to be.

And if you were elected to Congress you would move your family to live in DC. It was a given that the wives and children would become friends–which also meant you did not rip into your political opponents too hard or you’d hear it from your wife how you’d dissed her friend’s husband. Parties were thrown, children invited, and as grandchildren, we often enough got to go, too.

Riding the bus to school, more than once I had friends grieving to each other that their dads might not get reelected and then they’d have to leave all their friends and, basically, how could the voters not know that they needed to stay where they were?

And then come January I never saw some of them again.

I was thinking of one of them the last few weeks. I’ve never seen her show up on any of the usual places where alumni might connect, probably because she was gone by high school, and I wondered how she was doing and wondered why I was wondering how she was doing.

But that’s the thing. People we care about we always do, even if they seldom come to mind now.

The New York Times recently ran a story on the famous Senate Bean Soup served in the Senate dining room, and how it was in the Congressional Cookbook put out by the Congressional Wives Club.

My grandmother was the president of that club. The family has pictures of her with Jackie Kennedy, and when I first saw them I exclaimed that Gram looked dowdy! Gram never looked dowdy!

My mom said, Alison. Anybody standing next to Jackie Kennedy looks dowdy.

Anyway, I once had a copy of that very old cookbook and I have no idea where it ended up so I looked (quick, before other NYT readers beat me to it) and found copies priced to the moon–and one that was definitely not.

Which came yesterday.

It had much better binding than my previous one but it was a very different set of recipes and names. 1987 on the printing–and yet all the women were still “Mrs. Ronald Reagan” and “Mrs. Bill Clinton,” with the text helpfully letting you know those meant the President and the Governor of Arkansas.

Bill himself entered his pound cake made with buttermilk.

And over here, Elizabeth Dole, Transportation Secretary, you throw a can of cream of mushroom soup with a can of cream of asparagus soup, a can of milk, a can of crabmeat.

Julia Child winces. Turn the page.

The representative from Georgia tells you how to cook your three pound bear roast, but really, I think he just wanted you to be impressed that he had bear meat on his plate. Pennsylvania ups the ante with venison plus freshly ground wild boar chili.

The Turkish ambassador’s wife shares how she makes baklava, and I am here for that.

And there. With her first, maiden, and married name stated because she was not “wife of,” thus not relegated to “Mrs. (his name.)” Martha, daughter of Representative so and so from her home state whose last name I have never encountered anywhere but her family, there she was right there.

But not in the index. So I’m going to have to flip through the pages to find her all over again.