Died 7/29/14 in a motorcycle accident. This is sent in by Will Jennings.

I don't pretend to degrees of certainty, nor engage in thoughts of a Disneyfied afterlife. If it comforts the living or gives shape to compassion in any given moment, then I gladly add my small grain of belief. On Tuesday evening, July 29, 2014, at a rural intersection in southeast Minnesota, a pickup truck turned left from one county road to lesser country road. Such a common and ordinary motion; a summer evening in late July, perhaps a dew point keeping close the haze of mown clover, of raked alfalfa, like a soft blanket. It would soon have been dark as the moon was still new. Maybe a great many stars, the sort of which you forget are there when your days and nights are indoors or in the din of too brightly lit clusters of human industry. The blacktop would rise and dip with rhythm. If the truck signaled its turn, I don't know. I know my friend Robert was east bound, the two wheels of his motorcycle singing to him with the wind. And that is how a so banal a thing as a westbound pickup turning left on a rural road at night changes everything. I grew up knowing Bobby, then Bob, and only Robert Anthony when his mom wanted his attention right this very minute. We shared a street, classes in school when he came to Highcrest after leaving St. Joe's. He was older, stronger, more athletic, more curious, and I think smarter than most of us. If you would have looked into our lives back then, he's the one you'd pick to have on your side. Of anything. Bob took a whole lot of tough hits growing up. Hard stuff you don't just slough and walk off; things with consequence where he had to change what he knew about himself and how he would go on to be in this world. He did all of that. And more. He became a musician, eventually. I say that because he grew up knowing about things electronic...the sort of stuff I wanted others to think I knew all about but, really, my brain fogged and my eyes would quickly glaze over. His dad worked in radio as an engineer, so Bob knew about circuits and tubes, resistors and capacitors, and could read schematics the way I read baseball box scores: we both knew the larger narrative beneath those runes. So Bob went on to know sound, to articulate sound, to make sound work. Bob ran sound for his community theater, his church, and he made all of those signals of all those people all that much clearer, carrying just as far as they needed and then some. It’s not an easy thing. Sound is not noise and noise is by far the easier of the two. Noise is the default of human industry in a world where sound and silence find companionship. In his community of Lanesboro, Minnesota, there was a service for my friend Robert Anthony Petrillo. I wasn't there because I performed a song as part of my niece Alice’s wedding here in mid-coast Maine. I did my best in that moment to add what sound I can to a celebration of unmitigated joy, of hope, and of the commitment to each other we make when families and friends join to remind each other of our interdependence. But I kept my thoughts on Bob, his sister Barb, his large and loving family, and the community where he chose to make and give so generously of his life. I will imagine that energy going out in surround, one more voice raising signal above the noise.