It had come to feel trite to, along with “everyone else,” stop and post something, conspicuously sharing that one was aware of and appreciated, ostensibly mourned, the passing of someone well known. I have stepped back on social media, so I didn’t say anything about Robbie Robertson as soon as I heard.
But I was listening to World Cafe (I happened to be listening to the WEXT stream, pretending I can feel my idealized version of optimal weather from Upstate NY wash over me with the music being broadcast out of the Mohawk Valley) and they rebroadcast an interview with Robertson.
This is what you do when anyone you care about passes. You stop, you appreciate them, you tell others about them, and maybe you make a little vow about how you’ll maintain their memory for yourself going forward.
And while I am not of that generation and other demographics for whom Robbie Robertson was a first-order cultural contemporary, maybe even hero, the tentacles of his and others' music and that counterculture have stretched out and touched my whole life in different ways through family and geography.
Good for him. Good for me.
RIP.