1. This morning, our living room held a pile of boxes filled with things to donate and things to dispose of and papers and magazines to recycle. I spent much of the morning making trips to the recycling bins up the street, to the dump, and to St. Vincent de Paul's in Osburn. This evening, before I went to bed, I loaded up the Sube with more boxes of books and other things to take to Osburn. Today's work put us very close to having Mom's things dealt with and her house cleared out. Yes, two storage closets upstairs will need our attention next week. Yes, we still need to sort through Mom's papers and records and take the unneeded ones to be shredded. We have decisions to make about things Mom decorated her yard and gardens with. Carol and Paul have some large items upstairs to move. But so much is done. We've been working on dealing with what Mom left behind since July when we cleared out stuff on the side of the garage and began to sort out Mom's kitchen. I'm very happy that the end is in sight.
2. Christy, Carol, and I met with Debbie Mikesell at the funeral home this afternoon and finalized the logistics for the Celebration of Life on Friday at 11:00 at Mountain View Congregational Church in Kellogg and made plans for when we will inter Mom's ashes at the cemetery. I think the possibility is pretty strong that there will be a good turnout for Mom's service and when I expressed concern to Debbie that there might be people arriving late and we might not start right at 11:00, she immediately straightened me out.
"We'll start at 11:00 sharp! If people come late, we'll help seat them. Starting right on time is very improtant to me!"
I loved hearing this and I am especially happy that all of us are going to the church on Thursday evening, to make sure all the technology is working for what we have planned.
3. The reports were confusing throughout the day. It was certain that Tom Petty had suffered cardiac arrest Sunday night and by Monday morning had had life support removed. Reports of his death were premature, but he was actively dying all day and many of us began to feel the loss of Tom Petty. We now know he died on Monday, Oct. 2.
I have been aware of Tom Petty's music ever since that odd, Mad Max inspired video of "You Got Lucky", featuring the hovercraft and the cassette player shrouded in bubble wrap, appeared on MTV. I first saw this video in late 1982 or early 1983 and his music didn't really hit me right away.
But, back a little over a dozen years ago when I became an XM/Sirius radio subscriber, I started listening to Tom Petty's superb radio show, Buried Treasure, on the Deep Tracks channel.
Then I started hearing more of Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker's music on the satellite radio and I was finally old enough and mature enough to be affected by Tom Petty's songwriting and the musical stylings of his band.
By the time the Deke and I moved to Maryland in 2014, Tom Petty had become the songwriter I most admired and the Heartbreakers became the band I called up on YouTube the most often.
I came to love Tom Petty's immediacy and his clarity; for me, his songs were immediately accessible and they expressed beautifully the American experience of longing, dreaming, growing up, falling in love, and disillusion in ways that move me and trigger more memories of my youth than any other songwriter.
All day today I was back at the Northwest Metal Workers Hall and the Kellogg High School cafeteria. I wasn't hearing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1969-72, but two of his lines kept going through my head as I felt gratitude all day for Tom Petty's writing and his music:
I'll be the boy in the corduroy pants
You be the girl at the high school dance
That high school boy -- me -- was learning to fly. He was running down a dream. He was free fallin. He longed for the great wide open.
As I have aged into my fifties and sixties, no one has helped me look back and experience and feel those years of starting to grow up, of all the confusion and yearning more than Tom Petty.
Tom Petty has died, but thank God his music is immortal.
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