Mother's Day

Does South Carolina actually care about children and mothers?

“Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children”

-William Makepeace Thackeray, as cited in The Crow (1994 film)

“Forget courtesy because [the Boatswain] has to save the ship”

-Sally Green (handwritten note in The Tempest, circa 1969?)

My mom, from the 1969 Delta Delta Delta sorority picture, University of South Carolina.

One of the good things about moving, and never really unpacking everything, is that you find memories by surprise when you sort through a box or bin packed hastily years ago. When my wife and I moved into our last house, I brought along about eight large plastic bins full of stuff from the first house I owned, the house I inherited from my mom when she passed away in June of 2005. I was looking for an old guitar distortion pedal¹, something I bought as a teenager from Devine Music in Columbia. I didn’t find the pedal, but I found my mom’s high school diploma— May 31, 1967, AC Flora (hand-signed by then-superintendent Cyril Busbee)— and a “book of inscri…