MAMA'S BIG, CAPABLE HAND, REACHING DOWN

Will some mutant gene get into the female DNA some day that will alter the mother instinct? Has it already? With lesbians marrying lesbians and gays marrying gays, where goes motherhood? Strange form of genocide, isn't it?

Let's not think on those things today. Instead, let's wallow in some memory of our mothers during a less bizarre and bewildering time. Spin the reel of your mental images, zoom in, and stop the camera wherever you want.

For me the mental camera stops at a picture of two hands, a big one reaching down to hold a little one. The hands are Mama's and mine when I was a child growing up in a gentler time.

That hand reaching down and clasping mine was the definition of security. I'm sure the gesture began long before my memory faculty kicked in. But when it did, how many times that gesture was repeated! It was almost like a re-connected umbilical cord.

Lifting me down from the buggy, Mama's big hand would take mine and lead me into Langdon's Mercantile. Although she~ had to use both hands to conduct her business there, trading butter and eggs for groceries, I never strayed out of reach of that hand for there were strangers in the store, some with long black beards~~~, and a big dog lying on the floor. Wouldn't it be nice if those things were all children had to be scared of today?

After putting the groceries in the buggy, Mama's hand would reach down again and, oh, heart be still, I knew she was going to lead me across the street, through the wagon and buggy traffic and men on horseback too, to Woods' Drug Store. Past the cough medicine, past the soap and talcum powder, Lydia Pinkham's Co~mpound, Sloan's Linament, jars of Musterole, we'd walk to the back and sit down at curiculed ice cream tables.

"Two orange ice cream sodas," Mama would say, almost in defiance of a weary world that might have said, "You can't afford that."

When we boarded the train to go visit Grandma Casey in Fredericktown, we mounted the train steps together, hand in hand, for who knew how the train would separate us if she were guided to one coach and I another? I might have wound up in St. Louis or New Orleans, and she in Rock Island. Never to see each other again? Oh, hold on tightly.

Mama's gloved hand reached down to take mine to lead me into church and never let go until I was ensconced between two old sisters, so tightly I couldn't wiggle.

She reached down to take my hand when I came limping home from a poisonous snakebite, and then to take it again a month later when I got out of bed and tried to walk again.

At the Veiled Prophet Parade, a group of rowdy boys separated our hands, although~ we were holding on tightly, strangers in a big city. I was frantic, lost in the surging crowd. I'm sure Mama was too. I didn't look up for faces. I looked for a hand reaching down. After what seemed like a lifetim~e, but perh~~~aps was only five minutes, I saw that dear familiar hand reaching down. Never did any handclasp feel so good.

Mama's hands were big and capable. She wore a wide, gold wedding band, the only ornament. Never any nail polish. There was a little sunken place in one of her thumbs. She bragged about it to her young daughters, saying, "Not everyone has a dimple in her thumb." Many years later I learned it was the result of a bone felon, a thing we hardly hear of today. The nail on the middle finger of her right hand was set in, a little askew. Mine is too. See what I mean by genes marching on down through the centuries?

If, as I questioned above, the DNA experimentalists cause a mutant gene to dest~~roy the mother instinct, maybe they can "monkey" around and destroy what they might have wrought.

I don't dwell much on that light at the end of a long black tunnel when Jean's genes are flickering away. Rather, I picture a hand reaching down to get mine.

REJOICE!