Ninety-five years ago, my grandfather, Gaetano Boccaccio named my mother after his favorite Longfellow poem, Evangeline. Despite raising five children on a barber’s salary during the Great Depression, Gaetano made sure my mother took ballet, tap, and had French horn lessons. In high school, she played the French horn so well that she won a place in the All New England Orchestra.

Eva loved classical music, over the years becoming an expert of sorts. After listening to a few measures of even the most obscure work, she usually could identify the genre, composer and name of the piece.

My parents shared a love for musical theater and were devoted attendees of all the latest productions at the Schubert Theater in New Haven, CT. Back home in our tiny apartment, they’d gather with friends and sing show tunes: The Bells are Ringing, Summertime, Some Enchanted Evening.

After my father died seven years ago, Eva moved to a retirement community near us in Charlottesville. She took full advantage of the place: exercising three times weekly, reading to her heart’s content, and blasting her classical music like a teenager. Often, I could hear it from the hallway as I approached her apartment.

This winter, my mother’s Parkinson’s symptoms worsened, causing memory issues and several falls, resulting in her entering hospice care at her retirement community. In January, Covid and another bad fall put her into Hospice House, an eight-bed facility in a lovely old Victorian home.

My mother is in her fourth month at Hospice House and is continuing to fade, experiencing many indignities of old age which I will not enumerate. Suffice it to say, she is enduring them without complaint. (I did not inherit that attribute. Recently, I had minor foot surgery for a hangnail and have been whining about it ever since.)

These days are hard on my mother. They are also hard on all of us family members who are watching a once vibrant person suffer and slowly disappear before our eyes.

On a whim, I picked up a collection of 1,000 old show tunes at a library book sale. I read song titles to her. Whenever she recognized a title, she accurately sang the first verse and chorus of each song, which is remarkable, given that she’s now forgotten much of the past fifteen years.

Now, a week later, she’s confusing some of the tunes, but one song has stuck with her, Pistol Packin’ Mama I find this fascinating because the song is neither classical nor from a musical but instead is based on the true-life experience of Al Dexter who saw a pistol-packin’ woman chase her philandering husband through his tavern.

My respectable, tee-totaling mother sings the song in a deadpan manner and will perform for aides on cue. Here are the illustrious lyrics:

Drinkin’ beer in a cabaret,

And, I was havin’ fun!

Until one night she caught me right,

And now I’m on the run.

Lay that pistol down, Babe,

Lay that pistol down.

PISTOL PACKIN’ MAMA,

Lay that pistol down!

            At the end of the ditty, Eva always pauses dramatically to hit the low “D” note on the word “down”, which makes me giggle every time.

Despite her anguish and all her terrible losses, I believe my pistol packin’ Mama is telling me that her pistol packin’ self is somehow still in there, alive and well.  And furthermore, she’s letting me know that she has no intention of going gently into her good night but will continue to make music, perhaps a little raucously, at the dying of the light.

###