Music

Many Latter-day Saints have a soft spot in their hearts for some of Mom’s best-known songs such as “Love Is Spoken Here,” “A Child’s Prayer, “ “As Sisters in Zion,” and “I’m Trying to be Like Jesus,” but those of us who grew up in her home also have a special liking for some of the lesser-known, unpublished, dare we say even apocryphal songs from her oeuvre.

The first one of these I remember was a family night right about the time an injury caused her to give up sports for music.  We gathered around and she pulled out her guitar and said she was going to teach us a song she had written with a verse for each of us.  As you can imagine, we were quite curious to hear our own personal verses.  First, she taught us the generic chorus which worked for everyone.  It went like this;

Chorus (substitute any name):

Steve, Steve, we all love Steve,

More than we can say.

We love the good and we love the bad,

We love him any old way.

So far so good!  The individual verses, however, started with Dad and then worked their way through each child, pointing out certain, um, idiosyncrasies, pointing out some way in which we could improve.  My verse contained the rhymes shower and hour, which should help you guess the content.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) these verses were never written down and so are lost to time, except for one; the concluding verse she wrote for herself.  The rest of us recall this one quite clearly:

There’s a sweet and gentle woman

And her age is thirty-eight.

She’s more wonderful and kind than any other.

You might even say she’s perfect

(And so very humble too).

We are blessed to have St. Janice as our mother!

Mom, Mom, we all love Mom

More than we can say.

We love the good and we love the good,

We love her any old way.

I hope you noticed that that last chorus manages to say “good” twice, with no mention of  “bad.”  Even though we know it was delivered tongue-in-cheek, we kids have teased her a lot over the years for failing to point out her own faults in that song, but in retrospect, as I consider how she has lived her life as the years have flown by past forty-eight, fifty-eight, sixty-eight, with seventy-eight coming into view, I’ve come to think that maybe she honestly just couldn’t think of any.  I know I couldn’t have.

There are lots of us who have called “St. Janice” our mother.  Steven, Robert, Lynne, John, and Richard were born to her, though Richard only stayed a day, and after that, beginning with David and Bonnie, she and Dad managed to give us over 13 different foster siblings from various situations and even countries.  When I asked my sister Lynne what she had learned from Mom, she said, “I’ve been thinking recently about Mom’s ability to love other people’s children—to take in foster children with tough backgrounds, and her ability to soften them somehow.”

When Wayne arrived fresh off the Navajo reservation at age ten and was too shy to speak to her that first day, she quietly began planting flowers by the front step and motioned to him to sink his hands into the dirt and help, which he did, wordlessly welcoming him while planting seeds of a new relationship as they worked together.

Another brother arrived as a total surprise when the doorbell rang during family night and there stood the bishop with a very tense-looking 16-year-old boy.  “Hi,” said the bishop, “This is Guy, can he live with you for a couple of weeks?”  Perhaps more than any others who lived with us, he benefited from experiencing what a loving, gentle mother was like.  Those two weeks turned into a year, and bit by bit he began to relax, to bring down the volume of his words to less than a shout, and to stop snapping his pencils with a death grip when he was startled, as he realized the abuse he’d been subjected to up to that point in his life was not the norm.

My brother Robb remembers with the rest of us the sound of an IBM Selectric typewriter clacking away in the background late into the night when we were small—reassuring us that although the lights were out and our bedroom door was closed, our mother was still audibly “there.”  What we didn’t know then was that while Dad was in graduate school, she had chosen that late-night typing of graduate students’ dissertations in place of the drug store job she had previously arranged to take.  She had the job, she had the babysitter arranged, but when the time came to walk out the door and leave her little ones, she simply couldn’t do it.  I can’t remember ever worrying about whether she would be there for us, because she always was.  I’ve often heard her share the Brigham Young quote that women in the church can do it all, they just need to do it in sequence; there are seasons for everything.

I know only a little of the pressure-filled deadlines she managed for those sweating grad students who felt their future lives were on the line and thought she should be at their beck and call.  As a family, we all know much more about the toll those years took on her arms and wrists when, as she approached forty, she began to lose the use of her left hand just at the time she began writing music.

When I think about my mother and her hand, I have sometimes been reminded of President Kimball—called to be the mouth-piece of the Lord just when all but a ragged bit of his own voice had been taken from him.  Still, in a quiet, humble way, he spoke the words given to him as best he could.

While she admits to frustration and occasionally slamming her hands down on the keys and tearfully asking, “Why?” during those first years of her trial, Mom still found a way to keep writing.  When an endless succession of doctors, specialists, and even quacks ruled out many causes, but could never give her a solid diagnosis, she still kept trying to create and share something useful and beautiful with the gifts God had given her.

Because my brother John manages the office of our family recording company, he, more than any of us, has seen her at the piano composing for hours using only the thumb and pinky of her balled-up, painful left hand, teaching us that we can learn to accept difficult things with faith, trust in the wisdom and timing of the Lord, and become willing to learn the lessons our challenges have to teach while still contributing to the Kingdom.

And, with her characteristic sense of humor, Mom has often remarked that her bad left hand is a blessing in disguise, “People write me all the time telling me thank you for writing pieces with a left hand part easy enough for them to play.”

Even when a stroke weakened her right side several years ago, I never heard her complain, only testify that it is a tender mercy of the Lord that while she can’t feel much of her arm and leg, her hand still goes to the right keys and her foot can still work the pedal.

Lest this sound like a eulogy for my own St. Janice, I would like to add, on a cheerful note, that she is blessedly and approachable human, misplaces things occasionally, and admits to wishing the NBA men’s shorts were shorter, like in the old days (a la John Stockton’s, but we’re not naming names).  And once, when Lynne and I made her late (yet again) for a meeting, she was heard to mutter under her breath that she would gladly trade both of us for one more Robb (who was usually on time).

I love the story Dad tells of when they picked up John from his mission in Argentina and made a stop in the mountains of Peru to see Machu Picchu.  They were taking it easy to avoid altitude sickness, but that night Mom couldn’t sleep.  She fumbled for her glasses and made her way to the bathroom, trying not to wake my father.  Once she turned on the lights, the room started to swim and her vision blurred and everything felt strange and wrong.  “Doug!” she called out, “I think I’m having a stroke.”  My father leapt out of the bed and came stumbling to her aid.  Then he started laughing.  “I think you’ll be fine,” he said, “as soon as you take off my glasses and put on yours.”

Most people who know my mother know her through her music, so I would like to add that my mother is the single best example I know of being willing to bloom where you are planted.  When she submitted some of her early songs to the church music chairman, she was told that they were nice, but that she should “bloom where you are planted and beautify your part of the vineyard.  If it needs to be heard in the wider world, it will find its way.”  She then did what almost nobody who hears that advice ever does: she believed it.  She accepted it wholeheartedly.  She lived it.  For years.  Almost every one of the ten songs in the Primary Children’s Songbook people know her for today was written for a stake primary choir, for a ward young women’s event or some other church occasion or event—even just for her children and their friends to sing.

She did the same on her mission with Dad to Santiago Chile and on their church service mission for years afterward; teaching people to play the piano and conduct music for their local congregations and organizing beautiful adult and youth choirs from people who had no idea how much they could do with music. This is one of the lessons I most hope has rubbed off on me—that our gifts are to bless, not to impress, and that the numbers blessed are not nearly as important as sharing what we have been given.

If the traditional definition of “Saint” is someone dedicated to the Lord who works miracles for others, in my mind she qualifies.  In any case, a Latter-day Saint she most definitely is; the patron Saint of our childhood upbringing and young adulthood, and we all—those born into the family and those gathered in along the way—are proud to sing, “We’re so blessed to have St. Janice as our mother!”