Walter and I are Cub Scouts, and one day a week we wear our uniforms to school, navy blue outfits with jaunty yellow scarves secured by brass holders like napkin rings emblazoned with the faces of wolves or bears. My mother, returning to the social mode of her Eastern Star days, has become a den mother, organizing the weekly activities of some dozen little boys. Since this outgoing, administrative position goes against her essentially introverted nature, some signs of strain are evident, but she treats our Cub Scout troop as guests and is a flawless hostess. We pursue a project in the backyard, at picnic tables, and she emerges with trays of little sandwiches cut into triangles, and pitchers of lemonade, exuding a combination of warmth and effortlessness, projecting the sense that nothing in the world is more important to her than the immediate needs of ten-year-old boys. Thus other kids think my mother is wonderful, which I appreciate while noting nonetheless the difference between the vivacity with which she greets the scouts and the plainer life of every day. At scout meetings she is efficient, carefree, modern in her jeans and Western shirts, the picture of organization, even though I know some of our activities are a trial to her. All Cub Scouts in Tucson, for instance, are required to construct a rocket of balsa wood, and we must travel to a big metal building where hundreds of uniformed boys race their creations, which zip along on wires strung in the air: ho-hum. We both prefer the Blue and Gold Banquet, an event held in my school cafeteria, at which scouts perform and receive badges and awards. I like the rarefied atmosphere the name suggests; the romance of azure and gold, the medieval ring of banquet. My mother glazes hams, securing pineapple rings to their scored surfaces with whole cloves. Does she work so hard as a den mother because she wants me to befriend other boys? At the banquet—dressed in a sequined sombrero and a serape, holding a guitar I can’t play—I perform in Spanish, singing a cappella a song I’ve learned from a record:

Estas son las manzanitas

En el jardín de David….

I receive enthusiastic applause.