Sitting in church, I remembered. But not until then. Not all morning as I read the papers, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen. Not even as I dressed for church, overdressed really. Who wears a hat anymore, especially for a noon Mass on a hot August day? 

My mother wore hats. She sold them. That's what she did for a living, first at Wethern's in Quincy and then later at Sheridan's at the South Shore Plaza.  She ordered them, unpacked them, fussed with them so that they would sit just right on mannequin heads, and she wore them home every day. The quiet, sedate ones, straws and whimsies, were for weekdays; the more riotous ones, flowered and feathered,…