At night, she twisted herself into a human pretzel to sleep in a half-broken plastic chair beside my bed.Īs I fussed about stiff bedsheets or the overpowering scent of rubbing alcohol, she urged me to think of the hospital as a kind of summer camp. She smuggled in pizza and bologna sandwiches when I refused to eat the hospital food. “Not the ones in his right hand they wiggle,” she would say. Over the next few days, she hovered over med students, coaching them on which veins to use. The first time I was admitted to the hospital at age 5, my mother wedged herself between doctors and nurses and would have put on a lab coat and drawn my blood if they let her. And I didn’t put up a fight when she insisted on chaperoning my elementary school trips or walking me to class on my first day of college. I accepted the way she would smear sunscreen all over me at the beach, even well into my teenage years. From an early age, I understood that as her youngest child of four, and the only one to endure a life-threatening condition, she and I would always be bound by love and fear. At 40, I had grown accustomed to my mother’s overprotectiveness. Though I had survived cancer as a young boy, I now risked dying of embarrassment.

“My son can’t have spices,” she said, “because of his leukemia.” “My sesame chicken just has an odd pepper flavor.” A 77-year-old Italian-American hairdresser who believed that almost all problems could be solved with a pile of spaghetti and meatballs, she viewed my lack of appetite as a warning flare. The clothes you wore you’ve burned them all“Why aren’t you eating?” my mother said to me, her Yonkers accent blaring into the otherwise hushed Chinese restaurant. There’s nothin left for you to do but fly. I can only promise you that everything I said is true The feeling’s gone - the road’s too slick They are listed more or less in the order they were written, except for the infamous song This Diamond Ring.

This lengthy page contains the words to just about every song that Al Kooper wrote, or co-wrote.

Love so soft bet you cant