Cheryl didn’t want much for Mother’s Day. Skip the gifts and fancy meal. A simple “I love you” from her three progeny would be quite enough.

Jonathan, her youngest, came through right off the bat. When he came downstairs Sunday morning, he presented a mostly-legible, single-paragraph missive that ended with a declaration of love.

Good job, Jonathan.

Never mind that his note had been prompted by me, who had been prompted by Cheryl to prompt him.

The point is, the letter got done. And Mom felt pretty good about it. “One down, two to go,” she said.

When Cheryl turned on the computer, daughter Julia in Brooklyn was in her queue with a Mother’s Day greeting. Unprompted.

That left only her oldest, Josh, in Arizona.

Don’t take it personally if Josh happens to forget, I said. The life of a single guy living out of state may not lend itself to Mother’s Day prompts.

Cheryl didn’t buy it. A son is supposed to know when it’s Mother’s Day. Arizona is not the dark side of the moon.

I had scripted a festive Mother’s Day. The basic idea was to get out of town, roam Berkeley in the afternoon, eat pizza in Rockridge, then do something practically unprecedented: attend a play.

I’d chosen “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” a bloody satire at Berkeley Rep.

This Berkeley day was my gift to Cheryl, who is not my mom but hey, somebody has to orchestrate these things.

How we landed on Telegraph Avenue, ground zero for funky street life, I can’t quite say. It wasn’t the first place in Berkeley Cheryl would have wanted to go for Mother’s Day.

But there we were, swamped by people 50 times more colorful and twice as young. And Jonathan? He was inside Rasputin Music looking for cheap CDs.

We found a cafe with sidewalk seats, downwind from a middle-aged guy who kept firing off incense. We drank cappuccinos in a cloud of spicy smoke. Tourists would die for an experience like this.

Cheryl liked the pizza part of the day much more. Zachary’s is her favorite pie. But still nothing from Josh.

On Telegraph, she had checked her cell several times for a Josh message. At Zachary’s she checked some more.

This waiting game is no good, Cheryl said. She wanted to call Josh and say what’s up.

Give the guy a chance, I said. The day is still young.

Cheryl continued to eye her cell phone. She was fighting the urge to text.

“The Lieutenant of Inishmore” is the bloodiest play you’ll ever see, bar none. Unless your chosen profession is that of slaughterhouse worker, the carnage on stage will induce serious squeamishness.

Cheryl had seen “Inishmore,” Martin McDonagh’s satire about the Irish Republican Army, in London seven or eight years ago. She’d hated the violence.

So why had I ordered up another round of “Inishmore” for Mother’s Day? Call me Mr. Sensitivity.

I basically agreed with a sign in the Berkeley Rep lobby. The play is so horrific it’s hilarious, the sign said.

I also thought Jonathan, who is in a play under rehearsal at Napa High, would love it. Broadly defined, isn’t Mother’s Day about a mom making a son happy too?

Cheryl had consented to being retraumatized. She figured “Inishmore” wouldn’t be as bad the second time. She had possibly become inured to blood.

The play had lost none of its punch. In some ways, it was more gruesome than I remembered. I saw Cheryl averting her eyes from the worst of it.

Or was she merely thinking about Josh? Mother’s Day was winding down. Where was that boy?

At intermission, Cheryl turned on her cell. And there he was. Josh had left a short Mother’s Day message with instructions to call him.

Cheryl adjourned to the Berkeley Rep courtyard to talk to her first-born. She returned glowing with happiness.

The second half of the play was carnage on top of carnage. By play’s end, the surviving characters were sloshing about in crimson.

Cheryl handled it surprisingly well. All in all, this had been a fine Mother’s Day. Finally, all her ducklings were accounted for.

Kevin can be reached at 256-2217 or Napa Valley Register,  P.O. Box 150, Napa 94559 or kcourtney@napanews.com