She always wanted to listen to ” Me and Mrs. Jones”.
Perhaps this is where my uneasiness began with the inabilities Americans have in deciding if “I”or “Me” have a thing going on. Elton John rose to unimaginable heights during 1974 with the phrase”Daniel, my brother. You are older than “me”. It must have been easier rhyming “me” with “heals” than the more grammatically correct “I”. Who knows. He made millions with that song. I digress.
She played the Billy Paul album and always ,only,“Me and Mrs.Jones”.
I can, to this day, hear this song and see their single wide
mobil home. I can still smell the baby lotion and
wood polish mix that hung in the air. The polish, copious amounts of it ,
was applied to the thinly panelled inside walls as if to augment value and worth to a relationship void of respect and love. It was there, just there, I stood looking at the pictures. A large, gregariously inverted pyramid of images. With a flagrant disregard to the function and meaning of frames, there were images of her and her husband, their parents, (I assumed) and their little girls. Everyone was smiling. The memory of someone obnoxiously whining the word “cheese” hung in the air, irrefutably adding a slight hint of a yellowish hue to all the photographs. Olan Mills had done it again. Another satisfied customer.
They had come over, a few times, to visit us after church. They were a nice family. We had, it seemed, just moved to Northern California. My mom was always very friendly and loved to entertain. In my later years I understood her loneliness better than I did at the time. It was damp and cold and raining all the time. I discovered Johnny Carson´s ” The Late Show”and on Friday nights, ” The Midnight Special”. I felt like I could depend on Johnny to usher me , every night, into my nocturnal retreat. It seems like I slept a lot. My bedroom was just off the living room, down at the far side. In place of a door there hung some long beads. When they came for a visit she would just show up at my door and talk to me. She was nice. She was, I learned, one of the reasons I was living with my father.
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