March 10, 1975, was a Monday and at 6:15 a.m. I was brought into this world. At this moment I became a son, and Becky Sherrill became a mother. Neither of us at that moment knew what the next 49 years would look like, but what a journey we had ahead.
She was dreadfully afraid of spiders and she told me about the time when I was a baby that she was holding me in the bed and a spider fell from the ceiling and she threw me at it to escape. Later on in life she would be driving down Decker Blvd and she pulled down the sun visor in the car and a spider fell out and she drove up on the sidewalk to evade it. I have this same fear of spiders, but have never thrown a child at one.
There was a time before child seats – when I was a baby – that my mom laid me in the front seat and she slammed on the brakes and I rolled into the floorboard. Some would say this explains a lot.
When I was twelve-ish I recall that, at 11 p.m. or so, my sister had a nightmare and I came downstairs and both Steve (my stepfather) and Mom had both fallen asleep on the couch. I reached over the couch and shook mom to awaken her as I had a thousand times before, but this time was different. This time she was in the middle of some nightmare herself and she let out the biggest scream for the longest time as if I was attacking her. Steve awakened and thought I was attacking her and started screaming at me. We laughed about this for many years until she claimed she had forgotten it.
When my mother was teaching me to drive, she took me out in her Mitsubishi Mirage, and for miles and miles down Boney road it was “Get on your side of the road! Get out of the ditch!” as I “learned.” I was delighted I was able to repeat this phrase to both Keifer and Hope as I worked with them.
I don’t recall how old I was when the Lizard Man was seen, but there was a contest in the State paper for the best story or poem or song about the Lizard Man. Mom and I spent the afternoon diving into our creativity – which she was a master at – writing this page long Lizard Man song and then I snail mailed it the next day. We didn’t win.
When I was fifteen, I was upstairs in my bedroom, and there was a large explosion in the neighborhood that shook the house and rattled the windows for what seemed like an eternity. My mom promptly came to the bottom of the stairs and screamed at me “What the hell are you doing up there!” This ended up being a couple pipe bombs that the sheriff’s office had found and were detonating.
At 19, my mother was an Assistant Vice President at PMSC over “Point” software and I just knew through the nepotism clause she could help get me a job doing “computer stuff”. She said she would love to help me and she did. She got out the classified ads and circled stuff with a pink highlighter that I should apply for NOT at PMSC. One of those jobs was the computer store room at BCBSSC unloading the UPS trucks which I ended up being offered and taking at a company which I never left.
I cannot even begin to count the number of Scrabble games we have had in the last 49 years, but I can tell you she won about 85% of them, unless Steve was playing.
She raised me right on James Taylor, Kim Carnes, Jackson Browne, The Eagles and many others. So many Saturday mornings you could find us cleaning the house with the ‘Running On Empty’ blasting through the house. This extended throughout the years as we shared deep lyrics we would come across and then linking songs from Spotify almost daily. She loved the lines of Patty Griffith and the beautiful harmonies of various artists.
There are a thousand other memories and stories that we have laughed, cried, and heckled about together. Way too many to list out here and way more than you want to read in a Facebook post. While no more stories or memories are going to be created between us, the investment she made in me will live forever, as I carry those memories, those skills, that laughter ahead and reinvest it into those I am around and directly into my children.
You think my kids are funny? You think I am funny? If you are able to pinpoint the “funny gene” in our DNA, you will be able to trace that directly back to my mother.
Two nights ago she looked at me and said “Jeremy, I have had a wonderful life. I have two beautiful children and four amazing grandchildren. I am beyond blessed”.
While that may be true, the actual blessing was that she was shared with us.
