I'm about to get on a plane to visit my son for Mother's Day. He's 22, a senior in college, a tolerant soul. He seems to have accepted my determination to be with him on this high holiday of mine, matched in my secular reverence only by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre's annual May Day Parade in Minneapolis.

His father and I were divorced when he was young, so our ritual began when I was in charge of things, and he has allowed it to continue now that I am not. We'd spend each Mother's Day at The Walker Art Center, essentially eating well at the restaurant and then each selecting a gift for ourselves from the gift shop. When the weather was fine, we'd wander the Sculpture Garden or lay flat on our backs on the sunshiny grass. Gradually, we added art in small doses. Inside, he liked any video or audio installation and Charles Ray's Unpainted Sculpture, a faithful re-casting of a wrecked Pontiac Grand Am in grey fiberglass that rests ghostly in the gallery as if it had crumbled to a halt there of its own accord.

Outdoors, the two-way-mirror hedge, the massive steel "spider" with its wooden swing, and what we called the "big brain" (Prophecy of the Ancients) were his favorites. We'd circle and circle the glass fish in its elegant black pool and the Spoonbridge and Cherry. ( Once we heard a voice out of nowhere warning us not to even think about climbing on it. We suspected the thought police. ) Our day ended with the jazzy rush across the high bridge over the freeway, me shouting out the John Ashbery poem that meets you coming and going, him waving at the cars down below and running, running, running.

Those Mother's Days at The Walker are also, for me, a source of fierce civic pride. How lucky I feel to live in a town where these pleasures are accessible and affordable and available. I felt that same pride at the May Day Parade on Sunday. Thousands of happy people watched this year's unfolding story told by stilt walkers, giant puppets, and masked bands of children. Along with the parable about roots and webs that sustain us, we loved the the lying-down band playing "You are My Sunshine," the drill teams, and the kids in wagons pulled along by parents in face paint and frippery.

The reliable giants - River, Prairie, Woods, and Sky - towered on the shore with such dignity, as the red canoes drummed across the lake in Powderhorn Park to bring the Sun back. There's nothing like this parade and ceremony anywhere in the country. It's OURS. I am proud to live here, in a city where public art is so much a part of our lives.

Finally, it's my own mother I'm thinking about, on this third Mother's Day without her. She lived in northern Michigan, and I never flew home to see her on Mother's Day. Ever. No time, no money, no clue is what I can tell you about that now. And I will aspire the rest of my life to acquire her calm maternal heart. She did not require of me signs of my love and devotion, though she saved every card, seemed delighted by the flowers, garden statues, books of poetry, and art fair earrings I sent.

My mother would have loved to see me at her door, just once in my adult life, on Mother's Day. She never said it or even sighed it, but I know it now. What a gift there is in the sight of the light in your child's eye. That first embrace after a separation. The easy rush of familial conversation. Had I been with her on Mother's Days past, I'd be happily unpacking those memories this week, smoothing them out to get a good look at them.

The art of life is all about second chances. So I'll be at my son's door this weekend, and we'll head for the quirky, ancient lunch spot around the corner from his apartment, run by shy, aging brothers who love fat cookies, French bread, Blue Cheese dressing on roast beef sandwiches, and who, inexplicably, accept Euros. We'll think of them often as the years go by.