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Here is a backwards rhetorical question: How do your improve on the town’s Tom Robbins celebration and day?

Answer: You can’t. Don’t try. Do more and better by organizing something different. What is the necessary alternative roadside attraction? Let’s invent it by next summer.

Hopefully this unexpected answer your just read will be embraced and accepted for the necessary challenge it is.

More than one person has applauded the complete success of the Sept. 2 celebration, waxed on how wonderful it was to have a day focused on local people for local people and expressed their hope that it can become an annual event. Yes, but.

Everyone who attended, participated in, costumed or dressed up, applauded and bought raffle tickets can cheer for themselves as well as thanking Gina McCarthy, Meg Holgate, Betsy Humphreys, Alexa Robbins, Dorothy Bird, Christine Hill and the other volunteers who were lifted up in last week’s editorial. Tom Robbins was a trooper to let us hold him up and parade him through town.

Now, a conversation on an annual day without Tom Robbins participation is a good idea. Parading Tom yearly is not a good idea.

Continued thinking outside the box is necessary. Here is an early contribution: an annual celebration, perhaps in Tom’s name, that celebrates imagination and creativity in the arts, whether writing, music, drama, the visual arts or any other medium.

The future is about the idea of Tom and not Tom the person himself. Let’s bring in other creative, imaginative, think-outside-the-box persons to have their turns riding on the fire truck. Elves and fairies and role models of creativity are out there waiting to be invited to the Second Annual Day of Fun and Magic in the Spirit of Tom Robbins’ Imagination.

Our better future lies in meeting the challenge of evolving from celebrating Tom Robbins to the ongoing exaltation of the ideas, values and perspective of the ideals that the best of Tom Robbins’ works represent.

It would be supremely ironic if the good citizens of La Conner, in introducing next year’s celebration of Tom Robbins in it becoming an annual roadside attraction, turned him into an icon, even to the extent of one day in the distant future of mummifying his corpse.

Or, as Glen Johnson might write: a dummy of his mummy as long as he is with us. Wouldn’t that be funny, driving that dummy of his mummy around in the parade annually? Let’s place that on the fire truck in 2024.