This is a revised drawing from my Mother’s Day tribute essay published here in 2013. Mom passed later that year.

I was a bad thumb sucker, as my mama put it. But the one thing I liked better than my thumb was a pencil. At the age of two, I could draw Roy Rogers and Trigger better than I could say their names.

As long as I was drawing, I wasn’t sucking that sinful thumb.

Early on, my mama found the keys to keeping her toddler content was a grocery sack and a pencil. She would tear down a large brown paper sack and lay it out flat on the kitchen floor. I would lie there with it for a minute, gazing at its awesome emptiness, then – pencil in hand – disappear into it for hours. Mom could then go about her daily routines without a worry about me.

To my mama, the world’s best pencil sharpener (JD Crowe) – al.com

I only came up for air when my pencil needed sharpening. I didn’t have to say a word. I just held my pencil up and Mom came swooping in with her paring knife, the one that looked a hundred years old. She laid the pencil on her left index finger and scraped the lead until the point was sharp and her fingertip was black.

The same knife that peeled, sliced and cut thousands of potatoes, tomatoes, apples, green beans and cantaloupes also sharpened several hundred grubby, snotty toddler pencils. Please, not a word of this to the Health Department.

My mom is the best pencil sharpener I ever saw. Each point was a work of art. And like fingerprints, no two were exactly alike.

My early toddler drawings prompted the phrase my dear mother often uttered when looking at my work throughout my career: “I’m not sure what it is, but I can tell it’s real good.”

Thanks for always trying to keep me and my pencils sharp, Mom.

Happy Mother’s Day.

True stories and stuff by JD Crowe

The mysterious ‘Bubble Guy’ of Fairhope and the art of bubble Zen – al.com

How I met Dr. Seuss

Robert Plant head-butted me. Thanks, David Coverdale

I was ZZ Top’s drummer for a night and got kidnapped by groupies

Check out more cartoons and stuff by JD Crowe

Death by donkey dysfunction: Rest in peace again, Alabama Democratic Party – al.com

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has another mass shooting on his hands – al.com

Alabama baseball gambling scandal: Fired coach Bohannon is a hanging curveball – al.com

The only thing we have to fear is Alabama’s red state politics of fear – al.com

Kay Ivey’s new anti-woke venture: Kay’s Konfederate Koozies – al.com

God, guns and sacrificial lambs: Alabama’s worship of guns is killing our children – al.com

Fox News pays $787.5 million for lying: ‘Our viewers don’t want the truth’ – al.com

‘Hold my beer’: Tennessee GOP expels Democracy, goes all in on white nationalism – al.com

JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix.

1/92