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"Mom! Mom! It's eating my sock," he yelled. "Aren't you going to save it?" he screamed, his voice now breaking, and tears welling up in his eyes.

The vacuum cleaner had pulled his multicolored sock from under his bed. He thought it was going to devour the footwear, and it would be gone forever.

The four-year-old boy sat crying in the middle of the blanket-covered, sagging old couch in the three-room apartment where we were living in 1957.

The sad little boy was my son, Tunie, and I did not see him cry much after that. He grew up to be a happy-go-lucky kind of person who did and said things that made people laugh.

He was generous to the point that he would give you the coat off his back and then sit down to sew the holes in his jeans. If he saw that someone needed help, he was there.

Such was the day when he was riding in my car, when he forced me to a screeching halt, yelling, "Stop! We need to help that damsel in distress." The damsel was a beautiful young girl who looked able enough to call AAA to fix her flat tire.

He could construct to perfection any object that came in pieces in a box. His paintings in art class at the University of New Mexico had precise lines and definite curves with deep colors. His friends came from all walks of life, with a couple of them from Vietnam and another from Peru.

Tunie, whose real name was Wilbert, was the middle child of my three children — 11 months younger than his brother, Don, and four years older than sister, Karen.

Through divorce, I had become their single parent, in order to make a better life for us. Together we braved the uncertainties and enjoyed what life had to offer. All three graduated from Valley High School and continued on to further their educations.

"Do you know that Joe and I are in Elvis Presley's outfit?" Tunie, as a young soldier, wrote me from the U.S. Army Base in Bamberg, Germany. "It's pretty cold here in the winter. We are guarding the border between East and West Germany."

Soon after graduating from Valley, Tunie and his good friend Joe Jaramillo joined the Army, and I was not to know this until he was on his way to basic training.

"I didn't want to worry you" was his understatement to a mother who worried about her three teenagers.

After leaving the Army, he completed a course in drafting and surveying at Central New Mexico Community College (then TVI) and worked throughout the Western states before receiving an associate degree at the Standing Rock College in Fort Yates, S.D.

While working on his bachelor's at UNM and employed at Pharmacia, he experienced severe gastrointestinal bleeding requiring a blood transfusion.

A month later, while visiting friends in Santa Fe, he became ill. His bone marrow was not producing sufficient blood cells to fight the pneumococcus pneumonia that attacked him five days before his death at age 44. The electrolyte imbalance had caused him to become unconscious almost immediately after his admission to the Santa Fe Indian Hospital that December in 1997.

On Christmas Eve, at 7:45 p.m., his vital-sign activity ceased, as his sister and I sat at his bedside in the intensive care unit.

The long ride back to Albuquerque was through a blizzard, with only the taillight of a semi truck to follow down La Bajada Hill as far as the Santo Domingo turnoff. Then suddenly the snowflakes vanished.

At that moment, the melodious sound of "Silent Night" came on the radio, reminding me that on this night long ago a baby boy was born, and his mother, too, held him close to her heart without ever faltering.

Tunie was buried with military honors at the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. I take a single red rosebud to his grave each time I visit.

The waterfall next to the patio in my back yard is dedicated to his memory, and our family remembers him at each holiday celebration — just as we do all relatives who have gone to the Spirit World.

I wish you happy new beginnings in the year to come.