My mom is out of town this weekend, so no fancy brunches or breakfast in bed for her today. I’d still like to do something special for her, though, so I thought maybe I’d give her a little taste of immortality, in blog form, by relating a few anecdotes that may illustrate her innate coolness.

My mom was never much like the other examples of traditional motherhood that I saw around me during my childhood in 1970s Utah. She didn’t sew, quilt, crochet, embroider, or knit. She had little interest in crafty activities, she didn’t bake her own bread, she was never a Cub Scout den-mother, and she only participated in the PTA if members of the school board showed up on her doorstep with a butterfly net.

She didn’t hang out with many other women, didn’t belong to Relief Society (that’s a Mormon women’s group, for any out-of-staters who might be reading), didn’t read romance novels, and didn’t sit at anyone else’s kitchen table gossiping away the mid-morning.

She didn’t drive a station-wagon or a four-door, like all the other moms. She drove a ’56 Ford pick-up truck and, a few years later, a ’73 Mustang Mach One with a jacked-up rear-end and mag wheels. (Dad has often remarked that he started dating her because she was the only girl he’d ever met who owned her own pick-up and ski-boat.)

She never seemed to want a whole platoon of children, an unusual attitude here in Utah. And I never saw her in a dress unless there was a funeral to attend.

Now that I think about it, she resisted most of the things that defined femininity back then. She was, in many ways, still the tomboy I imagine she must’ve been as a young girl. She’s always been happiest outdoors, basking in warm sunlight and working with her horses — she could stand alongside her old Thunder, whom she raised from a foal and only recently lost, for hours, brushing and currying and stroking and speaking to him in the same soft voice she used when she spoke to me. When she wasn’t in the corral, she was in her yard, down on her knees with her hands in the dirt. Once, a long time ago, my mother’s flowers inspired the neighbors and provoked a kind of gardening arms-race, with Mrs. Sorenson to the north of our house and Jack and Rayola Smith to the south vying to out-do the much younger woman who lived between them.

Her one concession to “girliness” was her hair and make-up. She’d trained and worked as a cosmetologist during the late ’60s, and even though she stopped working after I was born, she could never quite give up her love for an elaborate coiffure and exaggerated “war paint.” Her hair color changed so frequently when I was little that I was almost a teenager before I realized my own brownish shade came from her. I never thought it strange that she was a blond one week and a brunette the next; I did think it was strange that my friends’ mothers mostly had short, dowdy haircuts that never changed.

(For the record, she finally settled on being a redhead sometime around Ronald Reagan’s first election, and she’s been some variety of red or auburn ever since.)

After horses and the Great Outdoors, Mom’s big love has always been music. Back in the pre-Walkman, pre-iPod days, she used to tote around a transistor radio, and both her truck and the Mach One were fitted with eight-track tapedecks that cycled endlessly as she drove around town. Her tastes ran (and still do run) toward good straight-ahead rock and roll. Nothing too hard-edged, just a three-minute single with a catchy backbeat and a guitar, and preferably a lot of bass. If you could dance to it, it was all the better. From my mother, I learned to appreciate Motown, Credence, the Doobies, the laid-back “California sound” of the Eagles and Poco, and, of course, Elvis Presley. Yes, my mother is an Elvis fan, who once probably boasted of owning every single album the man ever recorded on vinyl. But before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you that she’s not one of the fanatics who has a candlelit shrine in the corner of the living room, and she is absolutely certain that he really, truly is dead.

Mom used to do a lot of things for me — and with me — that other kids’ mothers didn’t. She took me to my first rock concert when I was twelve, Rick Springfield’s Halloween night stop in Salt Lake during his 1981 “Working Class Dog” tour. On other Halloween nights, she spent hours making me up, pulling out all of her cosmetology knowledge to transform me into the creepiest vampire or ghoul on the block. She looked the other way everytime I came in from riding my bike and drank half of her nice, icy glass of Coke. When I was in fourth grade, she let me stay up to watch Saturday Night Live with the original Not Ready for Prime-time Players, and when I was in middle school she sat up half the night with me watching bad early-80s fantasy and sci-fi flicks on video tape. (Rather than outright forbidding me to watch R-rated movies as other kids’ moms did, she functioned as an early form of CleanFlicks by simply standing in front of the screen when the too-adult bits came on. Thanks to this technique, I was able to boast of seeing a lot of pulpy stuff that my friends could only envy. Stuff that still haunts me, like Conan, Excalibur, and — God help me — The Sword and the Sorcerer.)

Shortly after I became a Star Wars fanatic, she brought home a copy of the novelization from the grocery store as a surprise for me. Then, in 1980, she brought home a paperback comic adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, and locked it in her nightstand until after I saw the movie, because she knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t be able to resist looking at it and spoiling the movie for myself. To this day, she still occasionally brings me a surprise from the grocery store, a package of my favorite cookies or a magazine with a cover story she thinks will interest me. Sometimes, just for old times’ sake, she even brings me a new action figure, even though I’m a grown man of 35; I’ve got one of her surprises, a three-inch-tall Darth Maul, glaring at me from atop my computer monitor even as I type this.

Like I said, she’s not much like other moms. And that’s what makes her so damn cool. So Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’ll see you when you get back…