Three days from this Easter Sunday, my mom will turn 84 years old. Part of what made her a terrific mom to have as a kid was that every Easter from as far back as I can remember through my senior year of high school, she would hide candy for me to hunt for.

Why it was so much fun to seek out little Snickers bars and chocolate rabbits I really can’t say, but it was. So thanks a lot for that, Mom, and for the many other cool things you did for me when I was young — including taking me to the library whenever I wanted to go, and also to Caplan’s Sporting Goods in downtown Portland, where you’d patiently wait as I looked through pretty much every Louisville Slugger in the basement storage area before deciding which one to hand over $6 for.

For all the support — remember that term; it will be useful later — that my mom gave me, though, there was one bit of help I really could’ve done without. What follows is a story so traumatic and humiliating I’ve only shared it with a few people in the 35 years since the incident occurred, but I’ve decided to go public with it. An Easter fresh start, perhaps — I really don’t know. Anyway, here’s what happened, and I actually can laugh about it now, being as it seems like something straight out of “The Wonder Years”:

When school started in the fall of 1975, I had just turned 12 years old, and just six weeks before my birthday my dad died of a heart attack.

So in retrospect, I probably wasn’t at the top of my game from a comfort and confidence standpoint anyway when I began my first year, as a seventh-grader, at Wilbur D. Rowe Junior High School in Milwaukie. Adding to the anxiety were a couple other wrinkles:

– Whereas I walked to and from school almost every day through the sixth grade at Riverside Grade School, which was just a couple blocks from our house, Rowe was about 4 miles away, meaning I’d have to ride the bus.

– With 800 kids in just two grades, Rowe was a pretty crowded place, and as a nervous seventh-grader, I really had no desire to be especially close to any eighth-graders who might be interested in making my life miserable from the standpoint of any kind of “initiation,” stories of which had filtered down to Riverside.

Thus, when school began in autumn 1975, my primary objective was just to survive, and by some miracle, things went relatively well during the first few week — including in the somewhat scary PE locker room, where seventh-graders were just dumped in with the eighth-graders and expected to avoid humiliation and harassment somehow.

At Rowe, every kid had a locked “basket” in the locker room where he kept his PE clothes — socks, shoes, shirts, shorts and jock — and was instructed to take everything but the shoes home each Friday, get them washed, and bring them back on Monday. In retrospect, especially given how much I’ve always sweated, it’s hard to believe I would’ve just accepted that I should be wearing those items five times between washings, but that’s sort of beside the point here.

Anyway, between first and second period on about my fourth Monday as a Rowe Junior High seventh-grader, in the jam-packed central hallway I looked up in horror to see my mom coming at me; understand this was an era in which basically no one’s parents ever showed up at school unless called by the principal, so merely having her appear at all, regardless of reason, was likely to set me up for at minimum a few days of taunting.

And then it got worse.

“Steve,” she yelled — OK, maybe not yelled, but said pretty loudly — while holding up a small, brown paper sack. “You forgot your supporter.”

I was positively mortified. My mother was simultaneously announcing the presence of and brandishing my most personal piece of PE gear in full witness of any number of schoolmates who delighted in making life hell for other schoolmates and needed no extra ammunition such as this.

Thinking quickly, I did the only thing I could do: Get that sack out of her hands and out of sight as fast as possible, and then get away from her as fast as possible as well.

Somehow, I really don’t know how, I managed to get away from that minefield before it exploded all over me; fortune smiled on me, because seemingly no one figured it out it was my mother and my jock.

If anyone had figured it out, and depending on who it was, my life as a viable member of that student body likely would’ve ended that morning.

After that day, I didn’t speak a word of the episode to anyone for probably at least 20 years. In fact, the first person I remember telling about it was news editor Kim Jackson a few years ago, and in the years since I’ve mentioned it to only a very few people — such was my level of trauma and, very nearly, utter embarrassment.

But, as I said, I can laugh about it, and no hard feelings, Mom. I know you were only trying to help me out.