Squeezing memories from this week

My friend Betty Douglass made a lamp for me out of an old accordion, an unusual objet d'art to say the least. Betty is clever. And one of the things we have in common is we both played accordions in our youth. Check out "Cool Accordion Girls" on YouTube, and you won't see us.
The old M. Carli box in ivory and brown has been around, you can tell. Betty found it in a vintage shop on the coast and painstakingly repaired loose bits of dry wood. Its bellows are cracked, and the keys squeak as if in pain when pushed. But something about the accordion remains graceful and lovely, the way things look when they have a history. The accordion lamp is mounted on a piece of cypress reclaimed from the bottom of the Atchafalaya Swamp. The lampshade is brown with French writing and lists slightly starboard on a stem of wine corks.
While Betty worked on my one-of-a-kind gift, people who happened by had varying reactions, some laughing and one saying it was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen.
Accordions are like that, the Rodney Dangerfield of musical instruments. They get no respect.
I love the lamp, and it has a place of honor. And I can't help but think that another Betty, my mother, would have admired it, too.
The Christmas I was 6, my Mother bought me my first accordion, a toy that emitted strange squeals that only approximated music. When I was 12 and wanted to quit piano, she ordered a real one.
My father and I had made a deal. I could ditch piano if I took up the accordion or steel guitar. At least I knew what an accordion was.
Mother found an accordion teacher and ferried me to lessons. She suggested I practice in the bathroom, which spared the rest of the family in one way and, in our bath-and-a-half house, inconvenienced them in another. But the tile walls made for good acoustics.
With a music book that had everything from "Grand Old Flag" to "Twelfth Street Rag," I spent hours on a chair in front of the lavatory where the notes were propped against the faucets. I slowly became proficient, only to emerge from the bathroom to discover that accordions had become as uncool as any instrument in the history of the world.
It was the era of guitar-strumming, not box-squeezing.
My mother had no sympathy at all for my junior-high predicament. She sat in the audience while I performed at a talent show, won a ribbon and fell into adolescent hell. She begged me to play for Sunday visitors-whose lack of enthusiasm sometimes matched mine.
When my father died a few years ago my mother insisted his dying wish had been for me to play the accordion at his funeral. So I took the dusty instrument from its hiding place and bungled through a medley of hymns he liked, only because I couldn't play a single one of them in its entirety. But something about that day made me realize I liked playing the accordion, and I've kept at it.
My mother has been dead for a year this week. I often think of things I'd like to tell her or show her. She wouldn't find the accordion lamp ugly or weird. She'd clap her hands in delight.