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| A beautiful day for funeral. |
For a moment at least, it slows down. Today was a day we’d
been working towards for quite some time, a memorial service for Erik Perkins.
He’s not someone we knew really well, but we’ve known him for a really long,
long time. 20 years? More? His daughter, Bryn, was the first person to ask us
for an autograph at a folk festival very early in our career, and that’s stuck with
us. Erik would import us to where he was Living in West Virginia to run open
mic events and small concerts for Bryn and her friends since they didn’t really
have much of that locally. Some of those kids have gone on to become really
amazing performers and it’s good to know we had such an influence. Erik and his
wife Lori later moved to Frederick and we never went too long between having
Perkinses in our audiences out there.
Erik was diagnosed with some sort of aggressive brain cancer
last summer – but he’d talked to me even before that about what he’d want US to
do for his memorial service. A strange weight to carry. He’d had Heather
perform music at HIS mother’s memorial service. We’ve been a part of his family’s
joy and grief for over two decades.
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| Bryn speaking at her father’s memorial service. |
We played four songs as part of the service, and then a set
afterwards as friends and family circulated and ate. He was a funny guy… rather,
I think one of the eulogies said it best… he was a silly man. And there’s a lot
of beauty to that. Beauty that I didn’t get to be as acquainted with as much as
I’d have liked. He’s left a beautiful family behind, but he Lived a very full
Life.
We played a song that was only a memory saved in Heather’s
voice messages. Thank goodness she’s an even more obsessive documenter than I.
I held it together through all the stories and people saying that his biggest
fear was being forgotten… look around this room… Erik Perkins won’t be forgotten.
And then Heather hit us all hard. He’d texted us and warned us and worried that
HE might not remember US the next time we saw one another. I’d sort of managed
to forget that. Heather reminding us of that, as she broke down… I played the
next song in tears; grateful I didn’t have to sing.
Farewell Erik. We Love you and we miss you.
From there Heather had to race to a gathering with HER
family to celebrate her grandmother, who’d passed just as we dropped the
curtain for Live from the Lair with Dave Dersham this Wednesday. She’s had a
day of death.
Tomorrow will be the 21st anniversary of my
father’s death. I have a list of things to do. But it can finally be a slow
day. And yeah… Bryn? Claude? It’s been 21 years. It gets easier. But you never
really stop missing your dad.
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| In good news, I met a clown at the memorial. Silly Willy teaches clowning on the East Coast. You no longer have to go to Clown School in California. |
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