Something happened for you and me a long time ago that greatly influenced our being here this weekend to celebrate Mother’s Day:

Our moms were born.

None of us are mistakes of nature; none of us got in the game, crawled onto life’s playing board, without momma. Neither did they.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

It is never hard for me to imagine mine as a girl. I have pictures, less than two feet away from me right now, of her in pigtails, grinning, a wisp of a gal, sugar and spice. I wonder if it was taken on a day her mother made a chocolate pie or on an evening after her daddy came home from the papermill in West Monroe and wrapped her in his big arms.

I have seen that same little-girl grin thousands of times. My mother’s smile, the one like the one in that long-ago picture, unrestrained and nearly wet-eyed, is one of my favorite things.

My mom. The little girl in her had my first pair of blue jeans and my first pair of boots, little red Roy Rogers ropers — (those were ‘in’ at the time!) — framed in a shadow box for me one Christmas. She gave it to me in October. Couldn’t wait.

The mother in her bought me a coffee pot when I was 21. Even though I didn’t drink coffee.

“Drinking coffee will keep your colon clean,” she said, to my face. “It helps prevent colon cancer.”

I remember standing there for a minute, like a statue, worrying a little about my colon and a lot about my mother.

But you know what I did when she left? Made my first pot of coffee. Then drank it.

I do not carry a picture of her in my wallet, but I carry several in my mind, complete with soundtracks.

One is of her sitting on the brick steps leading to the side door of my boyhood home in Carolina, blue jeans rolled up over her calves to just below her knees. An oversized shirt is untucked. Hair is falling into her eyes. She is shucking corn, happy, hollering something across the yard to our neighbors, toward the house with the 12 kids.

Here’s one of her singing School Days to get me awake in the winter. And another of her frying an egg and putting it on a piece of toast for me before sunrise on all those priceless summer mornings before I’d go to Mr. Peabug’s or to Mr. J.P.’s to drive a Farmall through tobacco fields.

I carry pictures of her singing in church, each of us holding half the hymnbook, her looking down and smiling. Even in those moments, with What a Friend We Have in Jesus filling the tiny wooden church and my mother brushing my hair with her hand, I’m sure she was wishing those days would slow downs. Little boys grow so fast …

In my favorite picture, my young mother is leaning out the screen door and calling me home for supper. I’m across the gravel road shooting basketball or in the woods in the back, and it is a summer evening and I smell like a little boy because that’s what I am. My mother’s voice, at dusk in the Carolina summer, is always there, always expected. When I think about it now, it sounds like music.

It’s not easy for a guy to come inside when he can still see the baseball (just barely), when the fireflies are dancing, when his legs still feel strong on his bike and his dog wants to play. She knew that, somehow. So she kept calling.

But if I could go back for one day, if I could hear her call me like that one more time, she’d have to call me only once.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu