LETTERS FROM HOME: MAY YOU ALWAYS HAVE SOMEONE TO COMFORT YOU

May 11, 2000

Dear Pat,

When DC's church held a breakfast for mothers last weekend, the speaker movingly remembered her own mother and grandmother, now both gone. Many in the audience were sniffling by the time she finished.

Every little boy knows the worst thing you can do is say something against someone's mother. Every adult knows the best thing you can do is remember almost anything about your mother.

When I was a little boy, mine was often off singing with the Mama-nettes, the trio she and friends Virginia Boren and Virginia Hill modeled after the McGuire Sisters.

They were almost regulars on a local TV broadcast called "The Breakfast Show."

"Sincerely," they sang, and "Makin' Whoopee" (I had no idea what that was!) and "May You Always."

They wore wild clothes, all homemade. There were pantsuits of shiny vinyl and citrusy Caribbean outfits donned to sing "Manana."

When DC was a teen-ager, she and her two sisters formed a singing group called the DC3. They didn't care about the McGuire Sisters. The Mama-nettes were their idols.

Mom always sang while doing housework. "Misty" and the smell of Lemon Pledge are forever entwined in my memory bank.

It was comforting having a mother who was always singing around the house. The times I knew she might be upset about something were the rare times she wasn't singing.

Of all the McGuire Sisters songs, "May You Always" is the one I associate with my mother the most, the song that conveys a mother's greatest gift -- to comfort.

May your heartaches be forgotten

May no tears be spilled

May old acquaintance be remembered

And your cup of kindness filled

And may you always be a dreamer

May your wildest dream come true

May you find someone to love

As much as I love you

DC was one of the tearful when the speaker finished talking at the church. She doesn't look forward to Mother's Day. It's a reminder of the miscarriages that prevented her from becoming a mother. But I see her mother Hank and Lucy and the children who are her patients.

"Tenderness does not choose its own uses," the poet Jane Hirschfield writes.

Living doesn't always grant what we want. It does always grant the opportunity to find out what that is.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian