Hey Tomorrow!

As I drove a song came on the Sirius XM channel that gave me a flashback to another lifetime…………………..

When I walked into the room I knew something had change. Everyone was there but the mood was far from what I had expected.

“What’s up?”, I asked. “Jim’s dead”, Sue responded with tears in her eyes. My head raced. “Jim? Jim? Who the hell is Jim?”

Jim, as it turned out, was Jim Croce. Although he had died in a plane crash the day before, this was September 1973 and news was not instantaneous. Now, on a Friday night when there should have been a party starting in the fraternity’s living room, there was sadness.

Croce’s music was soul food, music that felt comfortable and spoke to the familiar. His career had just started to take off but he had a cult following. Just months before we piled into the “Polish Sled” ** and traveled to a bar near Lancaster to hear him play.

The news was triggering. For some it was the first encounter with death and for others it brought back memories of other times, places, and lives lost. All of us settled into the moment. The “open house party” that normally had an attendance of eighty or more was postponed; tonight it would be a more intimate affair. We settled in with our friends and our drug of choice; for some alcohol and for others pot. The cassette deck boomed with the music from his album and suddenly Sue started to sing. When Hey Tomorrow played its second stanza, the duo of Jim and Sue became a chorus –

Hey tomorrow, where are you goin’
Do you have some room for me
‘Cause night is fallin’ and the dawn is callin’
I’ll have a new day if she’ll have me

Hey tomorrow, I can’t show you nothin’
You’ve seen it all pass by your door
So many times I said I been changin’
Then slipped into patterns of what happened before

‘Cause I’ve been wasted and I’ve over-tasted
All the things that life gave to me
And I’ve been trusted, abused and busted
And I’ve been taken by those close to me

Hey tomorrow you’ve gotta believe that
I’m through wastin’ what’s left of me
‘Cause night is fallin’ and the dawn is callin’
I’ll have a new day if she’ll have me

So, there we were, a roomful of college students who had lived together, studied together, shared stories together, became family together, mourning the loss of someone who we really did not know. Yet, our sorrow was real. I had been to more than my share of funerals in the first twenty years of my life but I had never been to a wake. Now I could honestly say that I had.

R.I.P Jim

** the name given to the gray Plymouth Valiant with the push button transmission that a fraternity brother owned and we took everywhere on our adventures)