Just over a year ago, the musician, Justin Townes Earle, passed away. It hit hard, like so many of the other losses we’ve experienced, John Prine being one of the toughest. But it felt as if Earle was a casualty of his own life rather than the pandemic. I didn’t know his music well, but we saw him one night as part of a folk festival here in town, and he talked about his life with addiction, described himself as a young man so high he could hunt ducks with a rake. Sadly, his passing wasn’t the surprise that it might have been.
What captivated me that night was a beautiful song he did called Mama’s Eyes. In the song, he describes traveling the same difficult path as his father, but then it shifts to this reassurance:
And I say to myself
I’ve got my mama’s eyes
Her long thin frame and her smile
And I still see wrong from right
Cuz I’ve got my mama’s eyes
Yea I’ve got my mama’s eyes
As someone who spent most of their life estranged from their father, I recognized something of myself in the song. Both of my parents have passed, but even now, I look at my hands, their short fat fingers and wide, crooked nails, and know that they’re my father’s hands, that when I wear my glasses, my brothers see his face in me. But I never wanted to be like him. He was a leaver, a little-carer who walked away from our family, from me. Just like Earle, though, when I feared that I might have taken on the worst of my father’s attributes and habits, I could look in a mirror, without the glasses, and see that I too have my mama’s eyes. And, I hope, along with them, a measure of her patience and the sense of love and commitment to family that she never walked away from. I wanted to thank Justin Townes Earle for the song and the recognition it gave me, but I also wanted to say that I am thinking of his mother, of her losing her boy. I am so sorry for that loss.
