This past Friday I traveled to Newberry, SC, to visit college friend Warren and his wife Debbie. A couple of months ago he invited me to go see 10,000 Maniacs, who would be playing at the Opera House in Newberry. I gladly accepted, as it would be one last chance for fun and frivolity before tucking fully in to the labors awaiting in the upcoming academic year. It was wonderful to see where Warren and Debbie live and to stroll around the campus of Newberry College, where he teaches English. Warren has already summarized the concert and the rest of our weekend together, so I won't spend much time tilling the same ground. It was a pleasure to meet Warren's colleague Jodie at the show, and she also has a marvelous write-up of her experience there. I will say that the venue, with a capacity of just over 400, is charming, and the acoustics are very good.
The show itself was fantastic--the set list had much in common with when I saw them play in April 2022, but there were enough differences ("Cherry Tree," "City of Angels," and "You Happy Puppet" were new this time) to make it clear the band has not distilled their act down to a play-by-rote experience.
Warren noted in his piece that three years ago our friend and my college roommate James had passed away suddenly just as I had struck out on a mini-concert tour with a grad school buddy, a trip which had culminated in that Maniacs show. At the concert on Friday, he jokingly promised to do what he could to not check out during my visit. That didn't prevent what did happen, however: I awoke Saturday morning to a text message from Martha letting me know that our next-door neighbor had succumbed to the aggressive cancer from which he'd been suffering over the past year-plus. Trevor was just shy of turning 56, far, far too early to go.
We'd been neighbors since late 1997, when he and Mary and their one-year-old moved in only six months after we had. Their second child was born five months before ours (a third child in our cul-de-sac arrived in between those two). A genuinely nice person, Trevor had over the years risen through the ranks at the Toyota plant here in town to a management position with a reasonable amount of responsibility. We became very good friends as the years passed, and he--and Mary--were gracious to our family time and time again. Some select moments, out of so very many, from the past quarter-century:
--hosting annual Halloween picnics in their driveway, followed by huddling in lawn chairs at the end of the cul-de-sac while trick-or-treaters swung by in the cold;
--sitting in their backyard around the fire pit making s'mores;
--going on two dad-and-kid trips with him to see Rush in concert (Cincinnati in 2013, Columbus in 2015 on their farewell tour; the latter included a feast beforehand at Buca di Beppo);
--loaning tools and lending expertise on those all-too-frequent occasions when I found myself overwhelmed by handyman work about our house.
Over the years, Trevor and another neighbor, Bill, had become knowledgeable consumers of bourbon. This past New Year's Eve, Trevor and Bill invited me to join them in a blind taste test, to see how well one could identify what one was drinking without knowing from which bottle it had been poured. I am most definitely NOT a knowledgeable consumer of bourbon, but it was truly enjoyable and informative to watch those two take notes, compare and contrast, and then express satisfaction and surprise over what they got right and wrong. Even though we all knew of Trevor's illness and its seriousness, I think we all expected we'd be gathering again this coming December for round two.
My family's life was made better in many ways large and small because of his presence, his active interest in being kind and helpful and mentoring. This is cruel, and seemingly capricious, completely unfair to him but also to those who loved him left mourning in the wake. The things that make me especially sad right now are a) all the plans he and Mary had for their post-retirement lives that won't be fulfilled, and b) how his grandchildren won't have him there throughout the rest of their formative years.
Life just sucks sometimes.
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Relatedly or not, mortality was an occasionally recurrent topic the rest of the weekend. Warren mentioned in one of our conversations how he's trying to navigate the remaining, awkwardly arranged spaces in the family cemetery plot in Nashville. On the return trip home on Sunday, I took a detour to have a late lunch with my dear high school friend Frank and his wife Lori in Greenville, SC. At one point, such matters arose again, leading Frank to acknowledge, "I just have so much more living that I want do." I hear you, man.
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I again tuned into The Spectrum on SiriusXM for this trip. They're still regularly spinning the songs I mentioned in a post back in June, but the playlist of currents has of course evolved since then. Recent additions that I'm particularly enjoying include bluegrass artist Molly Tuttle's turn toward pop, "That's Gonna Leave a Mark," and some tunes by acts trying to break through: NYC singer-songwriter Hannah Cohen's "Draggin'" and the very fun "Sally, When the Wine Runs Out," by ROLE MODEL (the stage name of one Tucker Pillsbury).
But the new song that's struck me most the last couple of weeks (and particularly the last few days) is "Afterlife," by Alex G, another fellow on the cusp of garnering wider attention. Its lyrics are elliptical but clearly centered around the notion of reincarnation. Even if that's far from my belief structure or that of my friends next door, I'm finding a bit of meaning, maybe even solace, in Alex G's playful touch and buoyant melodicism and instrumentation.
Be it heaven or something else, I just want the next stage for Trevor to be good, to atone for the tail end of his life being so undeservedly lousy. Rest in peace, my friend.
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