May may just well be the happiest month. Spring is really catching hold, people seem to be in better moods, and my sneezing is slacking off. It’s the month of flowers, is it not? You know, as the rhyme goes? April flowers bring not only May flowers but one dad joke.

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring? Pilgrims.

Sorry about that.

May also brings a wrapping up of sorts, with graduations being all the rage this month.

With high school exercises not until next week, Saturday is New Mexico Tech’s commencement, and for a full hour or so, not one cell phone will be stared at. Or not. Maybe.

If you’ve never gone to a Tech commencement, it’s a little different from what you might remember from the somber graduations of the past. Yes, there are those mortarboards, and yes, there are the black robes, but that’s just the beginning. The type of headgear worn by Tech matriculators can vary depending on their degree. You’ll have mining engineers with mining helmets and civil engineers with hardhats, for instance. Otherwise, your typical mortarboards are often festooned with flowers or models of molecules or glittery slogans. One year a student mounted a cardboard tube to his cap, and when he was handed his diploma, he pulled a string to release a burst of confetti out the top.

It seems scientists are not fuddy-duddies at New Mexico Tech.

But, to be shamelessly frank, waiting to hear the Herald mispronounce a name at diploma passing-out time provides a modicum of suspense.

And hey, don’t forget this Sunday is Mother’s Day, one of the top days that keep greeting card companies in business (right behind Christmas and Valentine’s Day). Although it’s a kind of an invented observance, it does, in fact, have bona fide roots. I was reading that back in the 1850s, a woman named Ann Jarvis took the initiative to form what she called “Mother’s Day” clubs that worked to lower infant mortality rates by improving sanitation and educating people on milk contamination and so forth.

A few years later, Ann’s daughter, Anna, figured the thought of honoring her own mother was a pretty good one, and by 1908 her idea of honoring all mothers on the same day caught hold with everybody, everywhere. As Will Rogers once said, “Mothers are the only race of people that speak in the same tongue. A mother in Manchuria could converse with a mother in Nebraska and never miss a word.”

I won’t go on and on about my own mother, except to say that although I probably gave her too much grief as a teenager, she never failed to show how happy she was to see me whenever I would go back home to visit after I grew up and moved away.

It’s been 21 years since ol’ St. Peter opened the pearly gates for her and told her to “come on in!” At the end of her 89 years, she raised two school teachers, one physician, one psychologist, a respiratory therapist…and..well, whatever I turned out to be.

And I have to say the positive impact she made on my life has survived her transience, as it has with my brothers and sisters. Truth be told, the one day I think of her the most is on my birthday.

Hey, maybe instead of thinking of ourselves, we should celebrate our mothers on the date we were born, like saying “thanks, Mom,” for the nine months plus 18 years she went through at our behest.

Anyway, in observance of the day, being the movie addict I am, I’ve come up with a list of pertinent DVDs to watch. None, by the way, include the word “Mutha’” in the title, heaven forbid.

One of my favorite celluloid mothers is in the 1985 movie Mask, where Cher plays a tough biker chick whose son suffers from a disfiguring disease called lionitis. Plus, it has a cool classic rock soundtrack.

More recently, you’ve got to hand to the multi-dimensional-space-time-hopping mother in Everything Everywhere All at Once for not going absolutely insane while saving the universe.

Other no-nonsense movie mothers include Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 and the baseball bat-wielding Wendy Torrance in both versions of The Shining. There’s also Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and the durable Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Both are the kind of mothers that don’t give up and don’t give in. Lord knows there are a ton of others, and I’m sure you have favorites, but personally, the ones that get me to blubbering like a sentimental old fool are the cinematic mothers of Bambi and Dumbo.

It’s that Baby Mine song. Go figure.

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain