Three pickup trucks. One stretch of highway.

Since 2005, I’ve routinely traversed a never-ending stretch of Interstate 81 from north-central Pennsylvania into Eastern Tennessee. Some of the trips were for business, others for pleasure, with every single trek one of personal reflection amid a wide-spectrum of the beauty — physical and spiritual — that is singular to the identity of America.

Tom Petty.

I can’t remember a time without him and his band’s music in my life. It’s always been there, just like Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson have always been there for my parents’ generation. I grew up on the sounds of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. We all did. Every single one of us, whether we realize it or not.

He suggested two. I bought three.

Standing in the small main office of the Woodsmoke Campground in Unicoi, Tennessee, I grabbed the three bundles of firewood and tossed them into my rusty, musty pickup truck and tracked down campsite #4.

Ugh.

The moment my girlfriend handed over my soaking wet smart phone, a shiver of isolation ran up my spine. That’s the last time I try to sneak a water bottle of cheap domestic beer in her purse into a bluegrass show, let alone have my phone also in said purse for “safe keeping.”

I ain’t perfect.

And the older I get, the more I realize just how true that statement is. Along with the new wrinkles and ever-present grey hairs I notice in the mirror, I also am noticing more of what is behind the eyes staring right back at me.

It does mean something.

Sitting in the darkness of the Grail Moviehouse last Thursday, this overwhelming feeling of deep sadness and endless curiosity washed over me. It was as if everything I’ve ever known, ever thought about or questioned, meant nothing at all — a huge waste of time, a merciless vacuum of birth, death, and destruction.

Since my mom’s passing almost a year ago, my dad and I have become very close. Without her here as our anchor, we’ve relied on one another. I now talk to him about things once reserved for my mom or sister.

It must have been a mom who coined the adage “time flies.” I swear it feels like last week when I was a seventh-grade teacher having contractions in the Waynesville Middle School cafeteria and barely making it to the hospital before my water broke.

I didn’t know what to say.

Standing in the doorway of the music venue, he said it so casually. 

You don’t know me.

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself saying that exact statement above to folks I love and care about. One being my sister over the phone back home in the North Country. The other via Skype with a femme fatale currently out of the country, one that has caught my eye over the winter.