Lightfoot music reveals rootball of memory

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In the grocery store, I saw a Gordon Lightfoot CD. I hadn't thought about him in years, and I picked it up. The moment I turned it over and saw those familiar titles, I was gone. The CD went in the shopping basket along with the bread and oysters.

In the car, I took off the cellophane. Then, with the groceries safely stowed at home and a long solitary drive ahead of me, I pressed play and let the music to carry me. Vistas of memory from forty years ago: the high school folk-singing club, and making my first cherry pie to the strains of Steel Rail Blues. Reading in the Winnipeg Free Press Prairie Farmer that Gordon Lightfoot intended to become Canada's top folksinger.

Then these two lines entwined me firmly in the rootball of memory: Is the old roof still leaking when the late snow turns to rain? And by the way, did she mention my name? My eyes filled and I spoke out loud, "Mompy." And she twenty-one years dead.

But how clearly I saw her, bustling around the kitchen in her gingham house dress and dingy bib apron. Her brown eyes, her long dark brown hair braided and looped over her head, her smell, her voice. And there I was, a grouchy teenager, sitting on the creaky kitchen chair beside the wood stove singing and chording with my first guitar, the one I got from the second hand store for fifteen bucks.

When she said to me, "Play that one about the old roof leaking," my world changed. My mother did love me. She had been listening all along. She wanted to hear.

As the car flew along 88th, the February day should by rights have been mid-winter, but it was spring. I glanced out at the pale blue sky, "Love you, Mom," I whispered, and two birds swam across my vision, soaring on an updraft of balmy air.

In spite of the perils of alcoholism and fame, Gordon Lightfoot is still going strong. In fact, on Friday night he did a concert in Toronto with Gord Downie. As Brad Wheeler captions the picture of the grinning duo in his review in the Globe and Mail, "Songwriters can never be thanked enough. Understanding what they do isn’t so important. Just be amazed – they deserve it."

I couldn't agree more. Keep smiling, Mr. Lightfoot. You'll never know how much you've given to people you'll never even see.