A few weekends ago I was hammer-down on I-40 headed east through Tennessee to the town where I grew up in South Carolina. Best friend I had way back in high school had passed away suddenly the prior week at 50, a true shocker to our circle and his family, for certain.
His name was Rob Anders, and he and I spent many an evening on the phone over the last decade or so, after a long time more or less out of touch — I’d moved from the hometown way back in the late ’90s, he’d stayed. I was tied up in family and all of you-know-what otherwise, himself in the same boat, each of us with a single daughter about the same age.
In our little figurative and quite literal band of young misfits around town when we were kids, Rob was the guy you could count on to be there when you called. If he said he’d be there, he’d be there, uncommonly outgoing, quick with a joke, a helping hand, a bit of information only he could summon to correct whatever problem you had. With respect to the last there, he ID’d many a mechanical issue for me, particularly.
He worked on cars in some capacity his whole life, when he was kid Volkswagen Beetles just because (did a little VW drag racing out in Farmington, North Carolina, and elsewhere time to time, back in the day).
Among a variety of other work pursuits (I recall him talking a lot about truck headlights at one time or another years back now), in 2021 he was helping manage an auto shop near our hometown when he put a particular idea in my and our other former bandmates’ heads, again just because, to try running through our old songs.
Take a day on a weekend in October, set up in that auto shop, invite some old friends, crank up loud, see what we could do.
It happened, and in following years Rob would take up with the welcoming 24 Hours of Lemons racing series as a safety man. “Racing for real people” is how the series describes itself, and when it made its annual stop in Bowling Green, Kentucky, last year, Rob and I caught up in person again, this time in Nashville.
Two days after he died in September, he’d been scheduled to fly here for this year’s Lemons event back up in Kentucky. Missed him, obviously, this time, and be certain I was full of regrets through the Gorge on 40 headed home, landing in time to meet my brother out at a place with decent tacos, where before long old bandmates and folks not seen for decades showed up to pass the time with memories hilarious and tragic, our own and others’ regrets, hopes for the future.
Headed out into the night with prospects of a proper sendoff for Rob the following day: “We’re going have to do better about staying in touch with him gone,” I said to our old bassman, today a military commander headquartered at any given time stationed in some far-flung locale halfway across the globe.
I was lucky to be looking at him, I knew, right here in front of me.
He put on a pained expression, nodded. “Rob was the glue,” he said, the glue between all of us, spread out across the Southeast and elsewhere, the globe.
On the way back toward Nashville 36 hours later I kept returning to that notion. The glue. Somewhere near Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Sevierville in Tennessee I recalled that last public appearance of American treasure Dolly Parton before her own death nearly two months to the day later.
She was a kind of glue, too, holding together disparate parts of our culture with music, philanthropy (my daughter first knew her as the “lady that sent her book”), commercial efforts like the truck stop that bears her name and where she made her that final public appearance. We haven’t given full air to her brief remarks from that hot day in June, but they drip with the kind of good humor that’s testament to what made her an effective communicator, inspiration to all manner of people the nation and world over.
It’s a catch more flies with honey than vinegar sort of approach, inviting all in, everyone to the party.
“I’m sure a lot of you are wondering why I wanted a truck stop.” she said. “Well, I couldn’t leave it to beavers,” a reference to a certain mega-travel-stop chain famously off-limits to trucks, delivered with a smile, of course, and much laughter among the TV news crews, influencers, and some truckers assembled.
She followed it with this: “We’re not trying to compete with anybody. We don’t think that we’ll have to. We think we’ll have everything that you want or need.”
Honey dries up left untended, glue won’t stick forever.
Things fall apart.
Hammer-down on 40 back west toward Nashville, I resolved to try, at least, to be as sticky as I could for my hometown crew of now half-century-old folks formerly held together by the auto-repair advice, music acumen, and singular drive to simply communicate of a common inspiration.
To Rob, to Dolly, to so many others who’ve held us all together, here’s a salute.
We’re trying.
[Related: RIP, Dolly Parton — ‘She will always love you’: Nephew’s touching message sharing news of her passing]
