I hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day, or at the very least, a mildly tolerable Sunday. Mildly tolerable doesn’t seem to be too much to ask of a day above ground. Could’ve been worse…could’ve been better. As Shane MacGowan sang in Fairytale of New York, “I could’ve been someone” to which Kirsty MacColl responds, “Well so could anyone.” So it goes.

Keeping with the spirit of Mother’s Day, Shane once sang that song with his mother as part of televised Christmas special on Ireland’s “The Late Late Show”. It’s about as good as one might imagine a mother/son duet to be, when the mother is not a singer, and the son has just spilt a bottle or two of Irish whiskey on his liver.

It occurred 24-years ago, but thanks to YouTube, we can enjoy it for the eternity of our being, or until the AI overlords avert our slack-jawed gaze elsewhere. Whichever comes first.

If the endorsements are lucrative enough, and it’s something the public demands, my mom and I will recreate the whole mess some night at The 109 Club. Those walls have managed to contain worse…so I’ve been told.

About once a month I play guitar and sing old country songs for the residents of Crest View Nursing Home. When your guitar playing is suspect and your voice waivers a bit north and south of perfect pitch, nursing homes are a good place to subject others to your hobby. They’re not going anywhere, and if they do, they’re not going anywhere very fast.

I’ve been visiting Crest View for about 2-years now, and the Director told me that in that time, there has been a dramatic uptick in DNRs requested by the residence. Coincidence? Whatever I can do to ease the suffering.

The residents like Johnny Cash, so I’ve learned a few of his songs to “perform” for them, and despite that, they still like Johnny Cash. The other day I was giving “Five-Feet High and Rising” a shot, and when I got done killing it, one of the residents said, “I remember hearing that sitting by the radio with my parents when I was about 5-years old.”

Music is powerful, even mediocre music. A simple song transported her back 75-years. For a moment she was ushered into the presence of her mom and dad, into the presence of a time a lifetime ago.

Another resident, wheeled in, head slumped, a mind seemingly elsewhere from her immobile body, sits expressionless. This is how I knew her for about a year, and then one day a nurse said, “She used to travel around with a show kind of like Hee-Haw, and her and her sister were the main singers.”

The nurse leaned in close to her and said, “Would you like to sing a song?” Suddenly there was life in her eyes, her chin lifted from her chest, and she sang “Butterflies” in its entirety, just as she had sung it with her sister 70-years ago. At the conclusion of the song, she yodeled a bit, and then went away again. She was there, if only for a while, if only for a song.

This life our mothers gave us is fleeting, enjoy every song.