At Random for May 9, 2008

• By DANNY HEITMAN
• Advocate columnist
• Published: May 9, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:10 a.m.

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As Mother’s Day approached about 25 years ago, a poor boy entered my mother’s florist shop and asked what kind of gift he might be able to get his mother for 30 cents.

Although my mother was  handling a roomful of customers, she embraced the boy’s problem as her own.

She could have told the young man that he was out of luck. Or, in a quick and expedient gesture of generosity, she could have given him a free arrangement and sent him on his way.

But my mother knew that the boy wouldn’t have the real joy of giving unless he sensed that he’d earned the gift to his mother.

“You’ve come at just the right time,” my mother told him, leading him to a broom in the corner. “I need someone to sweep out my shop. If you could do that for me, I’m sure I could make you a nice arrangement in exchange.”

Truth be told, as the shop swelled with Mother’s Day customers, there couldn’t have been a worse time to sweep the floor. It was also true that the little boy was not much of a janitor, simply moving the dust around the shop rather than collecting it.

“You’ve done a really good job,” my mother told her apprentice after he’d passed several minutes on the job. From her precious store of Mother’s Day roses, my mother made a beautiful bouquet and presented it to the youngster.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said as he walked out the door. “And please tell your mother Happy Mother’s Day.”

With a string of well-meaning deceptions, my mother had brightened Mother’s Day for one of our town’s poorest families. She thought nothing of it, since she was a firm believer in little white lies, pleasant fictions uttered to lift a lagging spirit.

While making floral deliveries to the local hospital, my mother would occasionally discover a patient that she knew to be without close friends or family. My mother was a social creature, and she regarded loneliness as the world’s greatest evil, something to be fought with all means and measures.

So she would travel several miles back to the shop, fix another spray of flowers, then drive several miles back to the hospital and enter the room of the patient who was all alone.

“It’s a funny thing,” she’d say to the person resting in the sickbed. “Someone came into my shop today and ordered these flowers for you. They said to tell you that you have a secret admirer. While I’m here making this delivery, would you mind if I visited awhile?”

We’ll have a different kind of Mother’s Day this year. Last week, my mother went to that same hospital, this time as a patient. She was supposed to have routine surgery, but there were complications in the operating room, and she never woke up.