When my mother was alive and I would visit her in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she would often ask her “Joni” to sing a song to her. My middle name in Jon, and my family nickname is Joni (pronounced “Johnny”) and my mother’s first three children used to sing together in the various churches she took us to. Joni, Jerri (Jerry) and Jaci (Jackie) would perform whatever song we had learned in the living room. My brother usually took the bass line of every song, for he was (ahem) not as musically gifted as his older brother and younger sister. I say this with no apology: I can sing. In her waning years, my mother would ask, “sing ‘Three Times a Lady’ Joni.”
The Commodores, a band headed by Lionel Ritchie, released the song “Three Times A Lady” in 1978, the year my first bride and I moved from California to Indiana with our 6-year-old daughter. We would drive to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to visit our families there, including my mother. My mother always had a song request for me, and I always had a song for her. I never denied my mother’s requests for a song: When she asked it of me, I would sing.
My mother would have been 96 years old on November 13th of this year; she asked very little of me and taught me a lot. I watched her work and learned to work, myself. I heard her cry, and learned to cry. She gave me a leather portfolio when I graduated from high school, so that when I enrolled in art school, I would have something to use to present my work. It would be years before I fully understood what a great financial sacrifice that purchase would have been for her at that time, and I never thought to ask her how she knew what the artist might need. I watched her cook too, and learned to do that, though I did not turn on all the burners too high, and have flames licking about the pots and pans; I never aspired to those kinds of fireworks. My mother worked for a catering service when I lived at home and when she brought home leftovers, we ate as if we were kings, although I do not remember my mother sitting down at the table with her children. But we are nearing a time for thanks, and in this pandemic-riddled year, we must search hard for reasons to be thankful. But I don’t: Thanks, mom.
Thanks for saying to me, “your sister needs a brassiere,” and believing that I would do the right thing, and buy one for her. (I can’t imagine what the sales clerk thought of the tall lanky 15-year-old boy looking through the bras, trying to decide on size.) Thanks for teaching me the “keyboard home row” which I learned by hearing you murmur as you touched a cardboard representation (we had no typewriter) “A S D F G H J K L semi-colon…” Thanks for taking a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, Missouri to care for your 55-year-old son when he came out of the hospital to recover from a burst duodenum. Thanks for loving my children and grandchildren and letting them hug you, though you struggled to allow me the gift of a hug. Thanks for letting my 7-year-old son play games on your computer while his 8-year-old sister chatted with you.
I sing to you now, mom: “Thanks for the time that you’ve given me … the memories are all in mind … you’re once, twice, three times a lady.”
And I love you.
cjon3acd@att.net