(Listening to “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)

Tom Petty passed away today.  He was 66 years old.  When he was 48, he might have saved my life.  Keep in mind, I’ve never met the man and he had no idea of his service.

A quick tangent.  Celebrity deaths are kind of strange to me.  They happen all the time and some hit me harder than others.   For me, when a celebrity death happens, and it’s a celebrity I liked or felt I had a connection to whatever it was that made them a celebrity, there’s always sadness.  The sadness isn’t like losing a family member or a friend or anything like that.   I’ve rarely met any of the celebrities I like; I’ve seen some of them in person from going to their shows, but I have no attachment to them as people.  Because of that, I don’t really know them, so the sadness is different.  It’s like the world seems just a bit darker for a brief moment; like a talent was taken away, and the whole world’s collective ability just dropped by a fraction of a percent because that person is gone.

The strange part about celebrity deaths is it usually happens to people I haven’t thought about in a while.  Take Tom for example.  The last time I thought about him, I was texting a friend of mine who loves Tom and Prince.  Prince has just passed away and I was asking how she was handling it and during our brief texts I said something like, “Yeah, I knew you’d take this pretty hard.  I’m sure you’ll feel the same way about Tom Petty when he goes.”  We both admitted we were a little surprised Tom was still alive due to the rock and roll lifestyle.  I hadn’t thought about Tom since that conversation; I hadn’t “missed” him at all, but now that he’s gone, now I’ll miss him.  The talent bulb of the world is dimmer and that’s when I notice.  It’s like I took him for granted and assumed his talent would just be around forever and now it’s gone.

I don’t know if anything I wrote in the last two paragraphs makes any sense.  I could probably write both of those paragraphs a hundred times, and they would probably mean something different every time.  Like I said, celebrity deaths are strange to me.

Anyway, Tom Petty might have saved my life once, or a least saved me from a beating.  I don’t exactly remember what year it was, but it was during college.  I think it was 1999, between my junior and senior years.  I had driven home in my van, to Washington, to visit my family before heading back to school in Iowa to start my summer job working for my college.  On the way home, I got a ding in my windshield, it split, and a crack ran through my entire bottom portion of my windshield.  While I was home, I got it fixed and I didn’t think anything of it.

When I drove back to school, I was cruising through Montana, and just before a little town called De Borgia, a thunderstorm rolled through.  This wasn’t just a shower, this was a torrential downpour.  I turned my wipers on high and they went swoosh, swoosh, FLOP!  They hadn’t been tightened down correctly when the windshield was replaced, and had flipped off the side of the windshield when I turned them on.  They were just hanging there and I immediately lost all vision due to the rain.  I slowed way down,  found my way to an exit ramp, and pulled into a gas station.

Now, these were the days before cell phones and before GPS, so even if I could have called for help, I was at least 10 hours away from anyone I knew or anyone who would have cared.  I was left to my wits.  At the gas station I found out what town I was in and I went to the payphone and started looking through the thin phonebook to see if I could find a mechanic.  No luck.  There was a bulletin board next to the payphone and I struck gold.  There was an advertisement for a 24-hour mechanic.  It was hand written and looked suspicious, but I thought I’d give it a try, so I picked up the phone and called.  A man answered, I told him my situation, and he said he’d meet me at the bar on the frontage road.  I asked how he’d know who I was and he told me, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.”

He was right.  De Borgia is a town of about 14 people, and I think every one of them was in the bar.  I walked in and felt like Tupac, all eyes were on me.  It was like I was an alien from another planet.  It was the grunge era and I was from the Pacific Northwest.  I had bleached blonde hair, I was wearing an old 70’s style baseball jersey from some bar in Nebraska that I had picked up at a second-hand store, I had my dad’s army pants on, rolled into shorts, I had long ringer socks on with my skate shoes,  I had small hoop earrings in both ears, and a hemp necklace on.  I looked something like this:

It’s safe to say I didn’t fit in there at all.  They knew it, I knew it.  So, I tried my best to fit in.  I took a seat at the bar, ordered a beer, and settled in.  The older lady next to me was playing video poker.  She had a cigarette in her hand that had an inch and a half of ash on it. It was bending down into an ash tray that had about 20 filters in it.  She looked like the lady in the anti-smoking ads, the one that has the throat ventilator and urges people to quit smoking, only this lady was about 3 years from being the lady in the ad.  Anyway, she started talking to me.  Her voice was a low growl and when she laughed it sounded like a cross between a wheeze and coughing up a lung.  She asked where I was from and what I was doing here.  Then she tried to set me up with her granddaughter who was sitting on the other side of me.  She replied, “Grandma!” and I laughed and as I walked over to the jukebox, I told her not to worry about it. 

I had officially killed about 35 awkward minutes of my hour-long wait, so when I strolled over to the jukebox, I put a dollar in and decided to pick a few songs.  I didn’t know many of them, but I did find one, “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam.  I picked the song and it started to play.  About 30 seconds into the song, as I was staring at the jukebox thinking of what to play next, I hear this loud, burly voice yell, “Who the hell played this sh**!”  I turned around, all eyes were on me, and this huge backwoods dude, complete with plaid shirt, suspenders, beard, and jeans is standing up and staring me down like I shot his dog or hit on his girl, or in this case, stole his best axe.  I didn’t answer, and he repeated himself, “Who the hell played this sh**!”  It was pretty clear he was talked to me, so I said, “Sorry, let me see if I can make it up to you.”  As I turned back toward the jukebox, I was praying there was something good to play…anything.  I wanted to feel like Indiana Jones when he picked the right cup and the guard said, “You have chosen wisely.”

I’m scouring through the different song selections and I’m thinking, “What would these people like?”  Then, I found it.  “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.  I punched in the numbers, and the song began to play.  I’m thinking, “Who doesn’t like Tom?  This has got to work.”  The opening guitars start playing that, “bum bum, ba duh da da da dum, bing bong, ba da da da dum,” and Tom starts singing, “She grew up in an Indiana town…”  The whole place starts nodding along, including my newfound music critic.  He looks at me and says, “That’s better,” and sits back down.  I give an inaudible sign of relief and take the last swig of my beer.  Just then, I hear the chime of the bell hanging from wooden door frame of the bar and the mechanic walks in.  He takes a glance around the room, points at me and says, “You must be the one with the windshield wiper problem.”  I walk to the door and say, “How’d you guess?”

Now, I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t picked “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” for the second song.  I don’t even know if the guy was really serious, but he sure seemed like it, and to this day I think Tom Petty saved me from something.

And, that’s what I thought about when I read Tom Petty had passed away.  I thought about that story, and I felt the sadness I described earlier.  Then the moment passed, and that was it.  I went back to my normal Monday life of hanging out with my kids.  We did listen to Tom Petty and had a dance party, then momma came home and we had dinner.

As for the windshield wipers…the mechanic and I go down to his shop which is about a quarter-mile from the bar.  He takes a look and says he’s going to have to take the dash apart to see what’s going on with them.  I had to get back on the road, and I was a bit skeptical, so I said I didn’t have that kind of time.  So, he said he had something that would do the trick.  He put some RainX on my windshield and rubbed it in.  He told me that should help get me to where I needed to go.  I thanked him and asked him how much I owed him.  He said, “Twenty bucks ought to do it.”  I agreed and went into my wallet.  Since I was traveling, I only had big bills.  I had two $100’s, a $50, and a $5.  This was probably all the money I had in the world at that moment, so I extended him a $50 and asked if he had change.  He gave me a smirk and said he didn’t.

Now, I was in a bit of a pickle.  I could give him the $50, but I might not have enough money to get to school, and this wasn’t the land of ATM’s, not that I would have had any money to draw out anyway.  I told him that if he didn’t have any change, then the $5 was the best that I could do.  He said, “Well, that hardly seems worth coming out.”  I told him again, “I’d be more than happy to give you $20, but if you don’t have change, the $5 is the best I can do.”  He took the $5 from my hand and growled, “I think you’ve spent enough time in our town.  I think it’s best you leave.”

Yep.  It was time to move on, time to get goin’ because there was definitely something in the air.  I thanked him for his time and got the heck out of dodge.  I didn’t run into any more rain on the last 1,000 miles of my trip.  When I got back to school, I took the road van to my mechanic and it took him all of 5 minutes to tighten the wipers free of charge (I wish I had though of that.)

That’s the kind of stuff that happened when I was learning to fly, and I’m glad that Tom was there to save me.  RIP.