But For Momma
After another short night, and another drive to the airport at Kloten, we dropped Julie off… Sergio talked her into taking the Zimmerman accordion back to Nashville with her.
We played a trio gig at the Palazzo Mysanus in Samedan on the 29th, a ski town about as far to the southeast as you can go in Switzerland, and accessible this time of year only by a train ferry. It’s not always easy to play for the locals in a resort town, and this was one of those nights. We played for ourselves and at the end we won over a small crowd. Stopping once for coffee, and again when Hans-Ruedi pulled over to fish an apple out of the back, we returned the way we’d come, by Bregenz, around the southern shore of Lake Constance, on past St. Gallen to Frauenfeld where we made a final stop at the music store for strings and a new ‘G ’ harmonica. Heading home by the back roads, we had one night to get ready for Scotland and Netherlands. The phone rang while we were packing: it was my sister telling me our mother had died that morning in Dallas, about nine-thirty their time. Slipped away, she said. Counting ahead I figured we were somewhere close to home, about the time we stopped for the apple. I didn’t feel anything at the time, no kind of preternatural trans-oceanic signal to tell me she was gone. I thought about canceling, but it wasn’t only me involved; there were others, and plans long set in place. We had said goodbye in Dallas in January. Mom would have wanted us to finish the tour, I reasoned. I didn’t have to think about it for too long.
She never really left me over the next few days. The first leg of our flight up to Edinburgh was delayed on the ground in Zürich, so that we missed our connecting flight in Amsterdam. We hooked up with our host-agent-driver-raconteur John Thompson who drove us to our first night’s lodging, the Glenfarg Hotel, near Pearth. The Bein Inn, our venue the next night, and our headquarters while in Scotland, was full. We played the State Bar in Glasgow, The Village in Leith, Edinburgh, the Lochailort Inn far to the northwest followed by an all night drive to the airport in time for a 5:55 flight to Amsterdam, and four more Netherlands gigs back-to-back.
Sergio had picked up some kind of flu bug that kept him under the weather, sleeping in his room most of the time when we were not actually playing or driving to the gig. Rallying after a nap he took me by surprise on a long afternoon walk that left me dragging behind in his wake. We were headed for the hash-bar, reason for his sudden burst of speed and energy.
I looked hard to peel away the years, to reveal The Hague as it had been after the war. That’s what they called it then, when my sister and I were eight and six, before the other wars came along to sow confusion. Huge swaths of the city had been reduced to rubble, bombed by the Germans. We walked to school, an English school where they hated my Texas accent. My father, a young engineer with Shell Oil and my mom, still in the bloom of her youth… we came over on the Holland-American Line on a ship called the Westerdam, our pictures there with hers on her passport. No one had cars after the war; throngs of bicycle riders gathered at every red light waiting for the signal to change. We lived in an upstairs flat for awhile, with a balcony where we put milk and cheese out to keep cool. Later we moved to a bungalow in Scheveningen near the sea. I had no inkling where to find this place, though it had to be close by. I did recognize the domed hotel, the Kurhaus, now obscured by newer buildings. And the beach, that had not changed; a memory came to me there, a day long ago with my mother and sister. We played in the sand but the water was far too cold for swimming. Sergio and I watched some guys surfing with para-sails. A chilly wind blew off the beach and we stood in the lee of a building. We bought a herring sandwich, raw with chopped onion. My parents had taken to things European, but they had stopped short of raw herring.
We had added a new song to our repertoire. Sergio called it up, and I was afraid at first that I would not be able to get through with it without choking up. Once long before I had written a song called ‘Piece of Wood and Steel’. A line in there had hurt her feelings and I had set out to write another to make amends, called ‘But for Momma’. When I called my sister she asked for something to read at the service. I asked Edith to look the song up in the catalogue and to email the lyrics to my sister.
But for Momma I’m still the gleam in her eye
But for Momma I wouldn’t be
I’m still her son, her number one
And she’s mighty special to me
And the final chorus:
Momma, can you hear me, this one’s for you
Momma, your boy’s on the line
In a world full of Mommas I’d still pick you
And lately you’ve been on my mind.
It happens sometimes that a tour ends just when you’re peaking with the music. That’s the way it seemed. Playing a Telecaster, Sergio used a small amp and a rack of pedals that gave him a variety of sonic textures—grinds, growls, moans and howls—he used with taste and precision. He could sound like pedal steel, or Johnny Cash, or Neal Young when he wanted. Often interrupted by spontaneous bursts of applause, he sometimes he went to Mars too; but I never tried to rein him in. We played our last gig Sunday at a place called In the Woods, near Amsterdam. Monday I sold my pounds to Sergio in return for Euros to change after I got back to Switzerland. We paid Joanna our hostess, and agent. Menno our driver came by and we settled with him before we went out together for one more trip to the hash-bar. Then having smoked ourselves silly, we found a real bar where we drank a couple of beers. I rode with Joanna the next morning to take Sergio to Schipohl where he was flying to Edinburgh to catch his flight back to Nashville the next day. I’d had enough of airports by then and elected to return to Switzerland by rail. I still had a piece of hash from the day before which I took the precaution of swallowing. I changed trains at Utrecht, and again at Frankfurt, finally a last time at Basel, pulling into Schaffhausen about ten that evening. Edith was there to meet me at the platform.
| More Blogs by Richard Dobson | Email Richard Dobson
