by Maggie Miller

Created on: November 22, 2008

It was a cold night in late November and, as usual, sleep had turned its back on me and gone elsewhere. Being that it was November and a culmination of negative occurrences had just intruded on my otherwise serene life, I found it impossible to remain in my bed. I was restless and in need of something calming or heartwarming, or both if I was lucky. As I tore through my already-ransacked room, I stumbled upon a large, square book with a damaged cover - concave now, probably because of the pile of tomes I'd stacked on top of it - and pulled it out. I brushed the proverbial dust from its spine and cracked open the scrapbook I'd made - or began, as I am notorious for leaving a trail of unfinished projects in my wake - that was stuffed with pictures from Summer 2006. I'm not one to pick through the years of my life and grant one year the title of "best", as I like to think my future holds better ones, but 2006 was so fantastic I'd felt compelled to create a scrapbook tribute to it. I opened the cover and ran my hand over the first page. It was a dozen stickers short of a scrapbook. It seemed I'd been too lazy and simply slipped some random photos through the protective pages, but they'd been important. And then I found it.

One of the few "scraps" of 2006 I'd actually included in the scrapbook was poking through the top of the page protector. I carefully removed it. There he was. Arms extended, fringes dangling from both sleeves, guitar draped across his chest, accomplished grin stamped on his face, beaming beneath the headline "Running Down a Dream". Even now, cold and numb on my bedroom floor, the newspaper clipping of Tom Petty warmed me up like an old, familiar kind of tea. I'd been a fan of Tom Petty even as an unassuming child. I vividly recall his strange music videos from my childhood. I'd be sitting in the den in my bathing suit waiting for my mother to come out of her room and take us to the beach, and she'd graciously provided me with VH1 to ease my wait. I couldn't have been more than 8, and I was young enough to be slightly perturbed at the eccentricity of his music videos. His last dance with Mary Jane, the corpse he'd removed from the morgue and waltzed along the beach with, was imprinted in my brain right alongside the images of him adorning a purple hat and prancing around a petrified Alice in his Mad Hatter getup. Had the word "trippy" been a part of my vocabulary I would've known how to categorize these oddities. But the songs were something else.

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