---

Now:

At this very moment, drug store cashiers are wearing weary frowns as they look out on long lines. The waiting customers are mainly men and boys wearing sheep-faced grins. They are simply shocked because the greeting cards have all been picked over. The good ones are sold out. Why that hasn't happened since '85 well, since the second Sunday in May last year.

Happy Mother's Day. Especially so to the moms who will receive -- from son or husband -- cards that proclaim `` best wishes to my favorite aunt'85''

Then:

Thirty years ago this week, we reported, `` Plans for Memorial Day observances were announced by parade chairman George Leedham during the recent meeting of South Attleboro American Legion Post 312 with Commander Albert T. Gardener presiding.'' So what's this Memorial Day item got to do with Mother's Day? It's all in the byline from that May 19, 1976, item: Ruth Flanagan.

My mother was a correspondent for The Sun Chronicle for about a decade, starting in the late 1960s, collecting news from South Attleboro that appeared under the heading `` Out Our Way.''

In the parlance of the times, she was a `` stringer.'' Her copy would be measured with a string and she would be paid in accordance with the length of her stories. She started at a rate of 10 cents an inch.

This gave rise to some interesting habits.

Like always mentioning -- as in Mr. Gardener's case -- who had presided at whatever meeting she reported. `` It helps at the end of the month,'' she would explain. Names added up to inches, which added up to dimes.

Like always having her desk covered with notes. Fully covered. And then some.

Like spending hours and hours on the phone, talking to Brownies, Mother's Club members, Legionnaires, church secretaries.

It was work that she loved and that her children remember her for. And it amounted to inches and inches of copy.

In between:

Ma moved to Warwick, R.I., in 1978 or '79. She gave up newspaper work and devoted her creative energies primarily to the fine arts of yard-saling and job lot shopping. She died in 1986. And the legend of Ruth has grown among her children. The notes from clubs and churches have become a towering stack that spilled off the desk and onto the floor. And by the time we next share Ruth stories, I believe those slips of paper will be piled all the way up to her cellar-office ceiling.

I will swear that she made $400 in one month at a rate of a dime an inch. The fact that this was nigh on to impossible -- it would have amounted to 22 full pages at a time when we had nine columns to the page and didn't publish on Sundays -- should not get in the way of a good story.

As for her time of the phone, it has become an indisputable fact that if you called our house and didn't get a busy signal, it meant Ma wasn't home. From that you could extrapolate that not a one of her children ever got an incoming call or the chance to make an outgoing one, unless Ma was out shopping. That was hardly the case, but again, facts shouldn't get in the way of a good story.

To all mothers:

Enjoy the cards you get today, as picked over as they may appear to be.

Should you come in for some teasing over any of your habits -- quirks, we're sure, would be an exaggeration -- enjoy that, too.

Time, it seems, will turn those habits into foibles, foibles into fable, and fable into legend, but that's one of the ways we're allowed to remember mama without shedding too many tears when she's gone. Love works in goofy ways.