dual personalities

Tag: Tom Petty

January 10, 2022

You and I will meet again

by chuckofish

God has blessed me with some great friends and Nicki was a true blessing to me for over thirty years. She died last week after a slow slide into Alzheimers, so it was a long goodbye, but heartbreaking nonetheless. After my mother died when I was 32, I sorely needed an older, wiser friend. Nicki entered my life at just the right moment a few years later and became that friend. 

I had three young children and a 12-year old marriage. She became my spiritual advisor and then my ‘spiritual friend’ to whom I told everything. She understood all my ups and downs. She knew my sins of commission and omission and she still loved me. She taught me many things. She taught me the power of prayer and the spiritual practice of the daily examen. She taught me to lower my expectations when it came to other human beings. Most importantly, she taught me to depend on God and not on people.

She was an impressive person. Beautiful, poised, a shining light in the community and a pillar of the Episcopal Church, she still had time for me. Wherever we went for lunch, she ran into someone she knew. She knew literally everyone. Being her friend gave me confidence. When I became the director of my flyover institute, she started taking classes and she brought her friends. She was always positive and supportive. She knit me a prayer shawl when I was going through chemotherapy.

I hadn’t seen her since we all went home to flatten the curve in March 2020, and by then she was fading fast into the shroud of Alzheimers. Now she is in Paradise with Jesus.

I won’t say goodbye my friend
For you and I will meet again…

A red-winged hawk is circling
The blacktop stretches out for days
How could I get so close to you
And still feel so far away?
I hear a voice come on the wind
Sayin’ you and I will meet again

I will also note the passing last week of film director, Peter Bogdanovich. If you have an hour, I recommend you watch this YouTube video of a lecture he gave at Hillsdale College in 2020, where he talks about John Ford. He is already suffering with Parkinsons’s, but it is a fascinating presentation.

Into paradise may the angels lead thee, and at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem.

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January 22, 2018

Snowmen prophets of doom

by chuckofish

I kept getting interrupted every time I sat down to write this post yesterday, which was par for the course as my plans kept changing all weekend. But c’est la vie.

I had a good weekend even though I ended up not doing much. I watched a couple of great movies–Allegheny Uprising (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944)–and the OM hooked up the new DVD player so we could finally watch Hell Is For Heroes (1962) which he got in his Christmas stocking. (It would not play on our old DVD player.) It is not the greatest movie–it is kind of like an extended Combat! episode–but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to SMcQ movies. And Bobby Darin was pretty great too.

File4_zps015279a8.jpgI went to church on Sunday and read the Prayers of the People. The temperature got up to 63-degrees (not a record) and everyone in town was out and about. It smelled like spring! The old January Thaw.

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The wee babes came over for dinner with their parents on Sunday night.

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IMG_1468.jpegAnd here’s a song from ol’ Tom Petty that I like:

Have a good week back at the salt mine.

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October 4, 2017

“Tonight we sail, on a radio song”*

by chuckofish

Well, the news media, after waffling back and forth, finally confirmed that Tom Petty died Monday night.

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He was my brother’s age and he always reminded me of my brother’s friend Mike, who was such a nice boy. I have fond memories of going to a Cardinals baseball game with him. He was funny and didn’t ignore me, the no-doubt annoying nine-year old sister.

Mike was the neglected third son of a distracted, divorced single mother. In high school he was packed off to a boarding school and after that he was a hippie. I met him once years later when he was married with kids, I think, and a carpenter or something like that–something very different anyway than his St. Louis Country Club background would have suggested. He was as nice as ever though and happy to talk to me.

Anyway, he and Tom Petty had the same vibe, so, right or wrong, I assume Tom Petty was a good guy too. I always liked him and will miss him. As Bob Dylan said, “It’s shocking, crushing news. I thought the world of Tom. He was a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”

Here are “14 Essential Tom Petty songs” chosen by the NYT. Not surprisingly the list does not include my favorite:

Into paradise may the angels lead thee; and at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem.

*You Wreck Me by Michael W. Campbell / Tom Petty

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June 14, 2017

Gonna stand my ground

by chuckofish

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Today we celebrate Flag Day, which commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States. You will recall that this happened on June 14, 1777, by resolution of the 2nd Continental Congress.

Huzzah!

And I thought this was interesting from Philip Roth in The New Yorker last week:

A Newark Jew—why not? But an American Jew? A Jewish American? For my generation of native-born—whose omnipresent childhood spectacle was the U.S.A.’s shifting fortunes in a prolonged global war against totalitarian evil and who came of age and matured, as high-school and college students, during the remarkable makeover of the postwar decade and the alarming onset of the Cold War—for us no such self-limiting label could ever seem commensurate with our experience of growing up altogether consciously as Americans, with all that that means, for good and for ill. After all, one is not always in raptures over this country and its prowess at nurturing, in its own distinctive manner, unsurpassable callousness, matchless greed, small-minded sectarianism, and a gruesome infatuation with firearms. The list of the country at its most malign could go on, but my point is this: I have never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or Jewish American writer, any more than I imagine Dreiser and Hemingway and Cheever thought of themselves while at work as American Christian or Christian American or just plain Christian writers. As a novelist, I think of myself, and have from the beginning, as a free American and—though I am hardly unaware of the general prejudice that persisted here against my kind till not that long ago—as irrefutably American, fastened throughout my life to the American moment, under the spell of the country’s past, partaking of its drama and destiny, and writing in the rich native tongue by which I am possessed.

(from an acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, delivered on November 20, 2002)

Hear, hear.

(The song is, of course, Johnny Cash covering the classic “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty.)

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September 25, 2014

The good old days may not return

by chuckofish

When daughter #1 and I were getting ready for our road trip to Arkansas a few weeks ago, we unearthed some classic CD mixes. This week I have been listening to one marked “Mom’s March Mix” which includes some old favorites, including this one from old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers circa 1991:

 

You remember that Tom Petty (born 1950) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. He is best known as the lead vocalist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,

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but he was also a member and co-founder of the late, great super-group The Traveling Wilburys, which included Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, and Jeff Lynne.

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He has also recorded with Johnny Cash and other cool dudes. In fact, he is a pretty cool dude himself. He has even been on The Simpsons–in the episode “What I Did on My Strummer Vacation”.

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Yes, that’s Elvis Costello, Tom, Keith Richards, Homer, Mick Jagger, Lenny Kravitz, and Brian Setzer.

So I hope a little Tom Petty will brighten your day. It has brightened mine.

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