Oct. 17, 2002

Dear Pat,

We just celebrated my mom's 75th birthday. She's quite remarkable, sings in a jazz band and so far as I know has never had a gray hair. DC has that same gene.

Mom just had glamour photos taken of herself to use in the band's publicity. I feel sorry for the photographer. She looks great for 75. She expects to look fabulous for 59. I recommended the photographer to her because his subjects always look so natural. My mistake. Mom wasn't going for natural, she wanted album cover.

People who have lived 75 years often exercise their right to be unapologetically particular.

You know that poem, "When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple?" My mom has been wearing purple -- but fashionably -- as long as I can remember.

Mom always has been particular about everything. She's only grown moreso.

We weren't well off when I was growing up so mom made the dresses she sang in. They were constellations of sparkles pieced together at the dining room table so she could sing torch songs at midnight.

She always had a job, too, back when most women didn't. She sold toys and gifts and later dresses. A discount at a dress shop: That was her idea of nirvana.

One of her best friends, Linda, is a generation younger and worked at the shop. She called mom "Pots." Mom called her "Lucinda." Mom was a surrogate grandmother to Linda's children.

When Mom retired, Linda quit the shop two days later. Some jobs are never the same when particular people you have worked with for years are no longer present. For many of us it's not the job, it's the eyeball-to-eyeball.

Our house was always stylishly decorated too. In the last few years Mom has dressed up the back yard with benches and ornamental figures to make it a quiet and pleasant place to be. As I age I find the same yearning to seek out and create places that offer peace and solace.

Mom also recently has become a fervent St. Louis Cardinals fan. She asked that the birthday party be held in the afternoon because the St. Louis-San Francisco playoff game was that evening. She's singing the blues now.

Mothers occupy a place in our lives no one else can ever claim. Brave men in battle cry out to their mother when they know they are about to die. Here's guessing brave women do too. Mother is the touchstone. The stories of our lives begin and end with her.

The card I got Mom for her birthday was of a little boy in a cowboy costume on a pony. I thought she'd like it because of the old family photographs that show me dressed in cowboy duds when I was a little boy. Instead, the card made her think about the pony she rode as a little girl. I was a little disappointed.

Sometimes all that love makes you forget your mom had a life before you.

At the party, DC told a story she heard from the son of one of Mom's old friends. Mom was the first of her group of pals to have a baby, so after I was born they all gathered round one day to do some admiring.

"He had such blue eyes," Mom interjected into the story.

That wasn't the point of the story. The point was that I treated this group of young women to a baby shower of a different kind.

I didn't mind so much that Mom didn't remember that one either.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.