Stardust, Ernie Kovaks, and the Stones
Happy Mother's Day to my indefatigable and blissfully stubborn Mom
I miss my mother every day since she passed away in 2017, but God bless her, Jane Potrikus went out on her terms.
Those of you who knew her would not be surprised to know this.
Doctors apparently warned her after my brother Chuck was born (child #2, 1950) that she may not survive another childbirth. I am the ninth of her eleven (1963). She navigated the family through triumph and tragedy and, still a young widow, picked up after 30-odd years in Cooperstown to begin a second life on her beloved Cape Cod. Got her degree in interior decorating, worked at a design shop, rebuilt a house, made new friends, was active in her local parish and sang in the choir, traveled to Ireland, walked on the beach, read stacks of books, hugged her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren with unlimited love. At age 89, she volunteered at a nearby nursing home, going, as she reported, “to visit the old people.”
She herself wouldn’t make it to 90, a quick-moving cancer sending her into the hospital not long after Thanksgiving. She was irritated. Her only hospital stays to date had been for giving birth to all us Potrikii. Doctors thought it’d be best for her to head to a nursing home; she checked out after a couple days because the home’s television system did not pick up EWTN (the Catholic network). If she couldn’t go to Mass on Christmas Day, she should at least be able to watch it on television.
My sister tells the story of making her house more Christmas-y, including setting up her Nativity display atop the television in the living room. “You’ve got it backwards,” Mom told her. “You have the Three Wise Men coming from the West. They came from the East.”
The siblings worked up a quick schedule to ensure she’d never be alone; my family and I went out to the Cape the day after Christmas.
Mom was still full of surprises. We were flipping through channels for something to watch and fell on Blazing Saddles. The uncut version. She roared her way through the entire thing. Angie and I had gone to see her for Thanksgiving, just a couple weeks before her hospitalization. At her favorite nearby restaurant, she ordered a vodka-and-soda and demolished the two-pork-chops special. The music was pretty loud. You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones came on.
“Oh!” she said. “I love this song!”
I did not know this. I also hadn’t known that she and my dad were big Ernie Kovacs fans. She laid that one on me on an earlier visit to our home in Niskayuna when she saw I had a couple of his DVDs in my collection.
“Your father and I used to watch him whenever he was on at night,” she said. “We’d laugh and laugh and laugh!”
The all-time-biggest surprise, though, came during that last visit with her.
“I’ve got some records for you downstairs,” she said. I figured she was referring to the collection of Living Voices and Henry Mancini albums that had been in our house for as long as I could remember.
Wrong.
“In the back corner is a box of my 78s,” she said.
This had to have been a sure sign of my mother drifting away. I mean, here’s a woman who had driven miles out of her way to take me to record stores as a kid, helped me lug crates of albums to my dorm room, and knew well of my vinyl addiction. You’d think she would’ve told me about this box long before this.
I’ll humor her, I thought. I’ll go downstairs and tell her I couldn’t find it.
But there it was, behind the little worktable and boxes of books – a 12x12 hard canvas box with a handle on top. I took it upstairs.
“There they ARE!” she said happily. “You can have them.”
There they were indeed: her Glenn Millers, her Harry James (some with Frank Sinatra). She talked often of her love for Harry James’s trumpet style; that was apparent from the dozen-or-so titles in the box. Stardust, her all-time favorite song. And William Tell Overture by Spike Jones, a record from 1948, the year she and my dad married.
I adore imagining my mother as a World War II teenager heading down to Main Street in Little Falls (her home town) to buy records. Especially Spike Jones. (Observant readers may note that William Tell Overture made an appearance in last week’s column about mixtapes.)
What amazes me more is that this little box of records survived every move my mother ever made. I can think of at least eight times she moved after getting married – most of those happening while tending to her growing brood – and this box of records went with her. Right up to the end.
They must’ve meant something to her. And that makes them mean all the more to me.
The records survived our latest move – this one from Cooperstown to Tucson via several months in a warehouse in Colonie. I played a stack of them this morning, topping it off with Stardust.
Happy Mother’s Day, mom!
Thank you for this one (and all of them, but this one's special)
Ernie Kovacs was the man. Way to go Mrs. Potrikus!