This week’s Musical Palate Cleanser is a quick reminder – you can still order from Amazon and have something here or there by Sunday.
It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday, and in searching for something to post for this, to be honest, the choices were kind of limited to hip-hop or depressing, so I’ll go with one that’s close to me:
Yeah, the song is depressing enough. If you know much about Lennon, his dad left him when he was young and his mother, Julia, was killed in an auto accident with an off-duty police officer when he was 17. To make it more depressing, he had a relationship with his mother, but didn’t live with her most of his life.
Mother was a single released from his 1970’s venture with wife, Ono, known as the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. It was the A side, with the B side being something from Yoko, which might as well have been titled “Who Gives a Shit”. John had just come out of four months of primal therapy, attempting to repair trauma from his childhood, and this was the result.
I post it here not to depress anyone, which it certainly can, but I recall this song with fond childhood memories. My parents are both former history teachers, both UGA grads, and between summers in Athens and trips with them to cultural festivals around Atlanta (the Greek Festival was the best), they both did a great job opening up the world to me as best you could on a teacher’s budget.
Our split level, 1970’s home, had a downstairs where we would spend evenings listening to various albums, everything from my mom’s preference of The Beatles and ABBA to my dad’s of Meat Loaf and comedy albums. There wasn’t a lot of censorship, as they let me listen to Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy. Needless to say, I had a young exposure to diverse language and material from an early age, which included letting me listen to some of the divergent music, like “Mother”, which I heard on Lennon’s compilation of the Plastic experiment album, Shaved Fish.
I often tell people I’m a blend of them both…my dad was a professional cusser, and my mom was a professional crier. You can only imagine what watching Georgia games was like when I was young. Actually, it’s still the same today. Etched in my brain is Georgia’s loss to Pitt and f*cking Dan Marino, hearing “We are the Champions” played at the end, and bawling my eyes out in the kitchen afterwards. Pretty sure a rich chorus of profanity was also in there somewhere, but I was too despondent to hear it.
As time went on, we had opportunity and finances to travel, where they both carefully ensured I had a worldview and context of life outside of myself and outside of Jonesboro, Georgia. They both have their talents, but mom was always the wordsmith, and helped me learn how to write, my dad helped me to do it with humor and flair. Dad was the story teller, mom was the copywriter.
To be clear, the Bulldawg passion comes from mom. Dad has a passion, as well, but mom is the persistent optimist and will watch the whole thing through. Dad will see the first opponent score and promptly lace a few profanities and go reload bullets. I knew Richt was cooked when mom informed me she had turned the 2015 Alabama game off and had quit watching. She never does that, and that was the apex of hopelessness in her game watching career.
She carried me back and forth from lessons on the saxophone and encouraged my musical talents. She was always involved in the boosters or support groups and she was likewise dedicated to her students, fellow teachers, and eventually the staff she supervised and lead until she retired years ago. She taught me how to lead with humility, and also when it was time to appropriately get massively pissed off and defend the things true to you, as evidenced by the time she gave me a good, crisp slap on the face when I came home drunk in my college days (I was driving, and I deserved that, to be sure).
Above all else, she helped to show me the experiences of a charmed and well-informed life, how to think, how to navigate my initial years in my own career in education, and how to get back up when life kicks you down. She was one-half of a dynamic duo that created me, and I’m forever grateful for my mom.
Here’s to moms everywhere…here or gone, I hope your memories are as fond as mine.
Love you, mom!
– JP
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