WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN

DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE

WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN

by Adam Carroll Draper

This week, that damn virus took an old friend I never met, named John Prine.  He wouldn’t know me from Adam, but I sure did like his songs.  I raised a glass to him and said something to the Lord about welcoming him home when I heard he’d died.  I am sure he’s there – he and my old dog, Noab.  I don’t want to think about a heaven where I don’t see my dogs again or Tiger, the cat who thought he was a dog.  That’s how I know they are there.

I don’t mean any disrespect to the preachy preachers and nuns who knocked me around as a kid and insisted they knew all about heaven.  Well, I guess I don’t respect them after all, if you call me on it.  They had all kinds of opinions about someplace they’d never been because they’d read about it.  Isn’t that the way?   Same thing with the people that got Pilot to kill Jesus. 

John Prine wrote a song I sang one night when I was still young.  I was drunk and high, down on my face in the middle of my living room floor, wishing I was not alive.  I wasn’t singing Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore, although I like that song.  In fact, John Prine didn’t even sing the version of his song that I was singing.  Nancy Griffin did.  But I could feel my heart peeling from something dreadful while I was baling (which must have irritated the people who lived below me).  “What in the world’s come over you, and what in heaven’s name have you done; you’re breakin’ the speed of the sound of loneliness; you’re out there runnin’ just to be on the run.”  It sounds stupid now that it brought me to tears then, but that song mattered to me when nothing else did.  When you are in that place, anything you like at all is like water in the desert.  I love John Prine for that.

I guess I’ll have to buy him a drink in heaven now.

My friend, Patrick Welch, who ended up being my therapist shortly after that time on the floor, liked John Prine.  He’s the one who got me listening to John’s songs.  Speed of the Sound of Loneliness was the only one I knew by him then.  That connection is part of why I took to Patrick when I didn’t feel like talking to anyone else – and a little part of why I still think Patrick is more like Jesus than anyone else I’ve ever met.  Patrick is also a preacher.  He’s retired.  The Methodists didn’t know what to do with him being so much like the person they said they were worshipping.

My heart is caught between sad that I won’t hear any new John Prine songs and happy he’s drinkin’, playing songs with Jesus and kickin’ it with Noab, Tiger and ‘em.  A couple of years ago, he put out an album (or whatever they call them now) called The Tree of Forgiveness.   He may have had some sense of what was coming, but he was only 73 when he died the other day.  I think it was more that he wasn’t scared of where he was going.  He had a song on that album called When I Get to Heaven.  That’s one of the first things I thought of when I heard he had passed away in Nashville.  “And I’m gonna get a cocktail, vodka and ginger ale.  Yeah, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long.  I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl ‘cause this old man is goin’ to town.”

God rest ye, merry gentleman.  I’m gonna miss you, John Prine.  This is my way of raising a glass to you, to whom I sort of owe my life.  It’s vodka and ginger ale.