Mothers Day: this is my favorite ancestor photo, my mother’s mother – Dellie – in a theater production at the turn of the century. I like to think some of her colorful qualities have coursed down in vivid matriarchal streams through my mother, my sister and me, and through all my god-daughters and my niece, Tiphani, and cousin Cici.  My adopted mothers of this and that;

<>Ella Fitzgerald is the mother of  how a woman’s voice can play with the air, bounce it, even.

<>Helen Hayes is mother of my first carnival midway prize, and mother of what a woman can do on the big, broad stage of life.

<>my great-aunt Marie was mother of the high life, champagne and room-service, elevators to her room.

My own mother (in her wedding dress) gave me her leather-bound Poems of John Keats, with pages cornered on some of the odes: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ are sweeter…”

I was my own earth-mother, taught myself to garden, pulled those first carrots, got a cat for the gophers. I became mother of the cat, named Alice. We lived in Nicassio. Band mother, pregnant with tunes and moves, and after some time – the guitar-players’s child!  Flower-child mother. Peace mother.

Oh Mother!

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This is the last issue of THE SOUND in the awkward morphing moment between the PDF and an elegant Web-journal at thesoundjournal.org Planned launch around July 20, 2009! Watch for more information.

Here is the May Issue: “HONORING THE MOTHER.”   You can download it here