When I was a boy, my mother woke my brother and me up to go to school with a 45 rpm record playing a song about a spider named “Willie,” who had so many legs it took him a long time to get his shoes on in the morning.

Since my mom worked the night shift at the newspaper, she did not get home until late, long after my brother and I were in bed. Various housekeepers stayed with us while she was at work. I often had trouble falling asleep. I would wake up hearing the lonesome cry of a freight train’s whistle and wonder where she was.

I don’t think she had had more than a few hours of sleep when she woke us up on those mornings.

From the first grade on, my brother and I walked to a school just off a highway a couple of miles from our house. There were no school buses. I don’t remember anyone getting a ride to school in a car.

If it was raining we wore yellow raincoats and rubber boots. Some mornings were icy cold, with snow falling and snowdrifts piled high beside the road. We wore long underwear, wool coats, toboggans and rubber boots over our regular shoes.

At school, there was a cloak room where everyone put coats and boots until it was time for recess, or time to return home. The poorest kids had thin jackets and usually no boots.

My mother walked three miles to work, and sometimes she walked home by herself in the early hours of the morning. If it was very cold or raining, she took a taxi. Because she was a crime reporter and knew many policemen, sometimes a cop would give her a ride home.

After I heard about a woman who was murdered — found stabbed to death in an alley — I worried constantly that something would happen to my mom. I lay in bed at night worrying about her walking through the dark, where I knew danger lurked.

I did not tell her that I was worried about her, only that I was afraid of the dark itself.

One night when I was in the first grade, she wrapped me in a blanket and carried me into the woods behind our house. She sat on a tree stump and showed me the shapes that the stars form in the night sky— The Big and Little Dippers, Pegasus, Orion and the Archer.

“There’s nothing to fear in the dark,” she said. “The night comes because God has taken the sun away to the people who live on the other side of the world, so that they can have daylight, too. But, look! He always leaves the stars as a promise that the sun will return with morning.”

After this night, I was no longer afraid of the dark, but I continued to worry that something would happen to my mother.

I knew if I lost her I would be alone in the world.