Many years ago, when the Designated Writers were far less sophisticated and erudite than you know us to be now (it’s a sliding scale), we often found ourselves in the Louisiana Tech print shop in the basement of Keeny Hall. There was a student worker there who was a typesetter for the Tech Talk and we often invented reasons to work along side her.

She was a very attractive redhead and basically just put up with us and our rampant immaturity. In addition to possessing the qualities often prized by the superficial male, her name was Sylvia. I never knew her last name, but I can still see her today, typing away to help get the paper printed.

Naturally, we constantly asked about her “mother” because of the song from the early 1970s. (If you don’t know the reference, you can stop reading now.) It was one “Sylvia’s Mother” joke after another and either one of us would have probably married her if she had just given us the time of day.

I thought of Sylvia from long ago when I got the good news and the bad news last week about the artist who brought us that classic song.

The bad news is that Dr. Hook passed away at the age of 81.

The good news, at least for me, is that I won’t have to get Dr. Hook and Dr. John confused anymore since only one of them is still alive.

Dr. Hook, aka Ray Sawyer, is probably more known for “Cover of Rolling Stone” and “When You’re In Love With a Beautiful Woman,” but it’s “Sylvia’s Mother” that knocked it out of the 8-track park in the early ’70s.

It left us with so many unanswered questions. Among them:

(1) For the love of God, why wouldn’t Mrs. Avery just put Sylvia on the phone for a second?

(2) What’s the operator’s problem? You’ll get your “40 cents more for the next three minutes” in a second. Just chill.

(3) Galveston? Sylvia really thinks it’s going to happen for her in Galveston? Has she been listening to too many Glen Campbell songs?

As it turns out, the song was autobiographical — there actually was a Sylvia whose mother had put the kibosh over the phone to some poor boy — and makes me smile to this day.

And if you run into our Sylvia from those Tech days, let her know that the Designated Writers still need some type set. We are just too afraid to call.

Christmas seems like a long time ago.

But it’s not, if “every day’s like Christmas.”

And here’s why it could be.

We get up every morning hoping for something.

We hope to make enough money to pay the rent. Or we hope to do something fun. We hope our team wins. We hope he or she will notice us. We hope to make a difference, or we “hope to just make it through another day.”

We run on hope, whether we think about it or not. When we quit hoping, we quit living.

“If you don’t have hope, you don’t have Christmas,” the preacher told us. “If you don’t have hope, you don’t have life.”

If that’s true, hope better be standard equipment. But it’s not. Hope comes as an option only.

Good, then, that the Christmas season is about hope. No hope? No Christmas.

The lights. The tree. The Nativity scene. Symbols of hope. Pictures of hope. Even the presents are mysteries wrapped, hope in a package, hope on a small and non-eternal scale. “I hope grandma didn’t get me socks!?” Again!”

We’re told that the greatest of all things is love. Not faith or hope, each of which hit the tape at about the same time as the other. When you die, what you’ve had faith in will either be there – or it won’t. What you’ve hoped for will be realized – or it won’t. At that point, you’ll have use of neither. At that point, love has the stage to itself.

But in a world filled with “Why’s,” way down here, hope comes in handy. Sort of like air comes in handy.

We start out hoping for little things. A bike and a ball glove and my two front teeth. But you get older, and it’s a different ballgame. You hope for a better job. A better home. A home at all. Someone to love. Someone to even care.

There are days when all you want is hope. Or even a hint of it. I had a friend in that boat. His report from the doctor wasn’t good that day a couple of years ago.

But faithfully, the patient, my friend, did as he was told.

And miraculously, though the climb was steep with dips now and then, the news from the Houston hospital kept becoming more and more favorable.

Finally, one cool Saturday morning this fall, he called to say the doctor had found no cancer. The doctor even told him to come back not in three months, but in six. And after that, probably for not another year.

“A guy asked me back then, ‘What do you do when you find out you have Stage 4 cancer?’” my buddy told me. “And I said that the first thing you do is you get angry. And then you cry.

“And now I know what you do when they tell you you HAD Stage 4 cancer but you’re well now,” he said. “What you do is get really happy. And grateful. And then you cry again.”

There are different kinds of tears. Some – like the ones that come when you find out you’ve been granted more life to live – are liquid joy. They speak what we can’t say.

And there are tears of anger. Or fear. Or tears when healing doesn’t come. But Christmas means we don’t ever have to cry as those who have no hope. Because of Christmas, hope makes all the difference in the world.

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