Blue Guitar Highway

Mississippi Farewell

  MISSISSIPPI FAREWELL All artists are mama’s boys, or daddy’s girls. My mother often told me that as a little boy I’d run around the house saying, “Mommy, I got all this music in my head and I don’t know what to do.” Like her father, Ernest Paul, my namesake, Mom could spin a good yarn and was never shy of exaggerating a story if it helped sell it. Nothing wrong with that. She was a wonderful singer, too. Her brother Gerald played soprano saxophone in a jazz band while in high school in Bemidji, near Lake Itasca, headwaters of the Mississippi River and home to large statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. On occasion my mom would sit in with the jazz band. As a child I loved to sit next to her in church and listen to her sing, like the precocial loon that often rides on the parent’s back in its water cradle. Sitting next to my dad was a different story entirely. When he wasn’t checking his watch or passing us Life Savers, he would sing in a low rumble that made Johnny Cash sound like Enrico Caruso. Mom was also an accomplished pianist in her younger years. She wanted each of us kids to learn to play an instrument. We had an old upright piano in our dining room, and each began lessons around second grade with Mrs. Dorothea Helenius Tomes, a talented and eccentric local pianist who lived just a few blocks from our house. She wore her blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, black cat’s-eye glasses with rhinestones on the outer corners, and bright-red lipstick. Her agile fingers were long and thin and baubled with a large aquamarine or topaz ring that glinted off the keyboard as she played. We sat together on the piano bench of her baby grand as she demonstrated simple notes from music that looked to me like hieroglyphics. It messed with my brain, and I lasted for only two lessons, faking my way through both. My hands, it seemed, were more suited for fingering a fret board than for tinkling the ivories. Weekends at our house were for shoveling out, Mom’s term for everyone pitching in to clean, but when the work was done I could practice and play to my heart’s content. She would rather hear my feet tapping time to the guitar in my bedroom above the dining room than see them running out the door with my buddies, heading for mischief. MISSISSIPPI FAREWELL   Mom drove me to all of my early gigs and frequently took a seat in the audience. If I played within an hour of Virginia after I was on my own, she’d show up with several of her friends in tow. I would always introduce her and dedicate a song. In 1992, Mom called me with the devastating news that she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. Sounding strong and matter-of-fact, she said she’d be coming to the University of Minnesota for more tests and to plan on the proper course of action. I hung up the phone and cried until my eyes ran out of tears. She was only sixty-two. When she came down to her first appointment, we got together for dinner. She was always on the cusp of her next great adventure and game for new settings, so we chose an Ethiopian restaurant on the West Bank. There we ate injera and doro wat with our fingers, and over dinner we discussed her doctor’s appointment and the road that lay ahead. It turned out I knew the head of the department where she’d be receiving treatments . Knowing this brought me great solace in this unchartered territory of our relationship. A short time later, I was playing a college gig in Pocatello, Idaho. I called my folks one night and sensed something was wrong when no one answered. I learned the next morning that Mom had suffered a massive nosebleed and had been in the hospital. After we hung I up, I sat down and wrote Mom a letter on cheap hotel stationery to tell her in writing just how much I loved her, how much I appreciated everything she’d always done for me, and how her lessons will stay with me forever. We both started to realize, in spite of an outside chance for a...