Rainy Music

It had rained all day, and I kept checking the weather app hoping for some miracle clearance by concert time. It didn't come and we went anyway. It was a rain or shine event, and he was my favorite musician from college days, not someone I'd kept up with over the decades, and couldn't name his newer albums, but someone whose voice and words had burrowed into me at twenty and never left.

The crowd around us was not young. There were people who had driven hours, who had dug out concert tees from a previous decade or two, who stood with the slightly self-conscious joy of people who hadn't felt that kind of joy in a long time. There was no parking for ten blocks around the stage. It continued to rain and we stood in the mud, dancing. 

He's in his seventies now. Some of the higher notes don't land the way they once did and you can hear him working around them, choosing different routes through the melody. Perhaps we recognize something of our own mortality in how the songs we loved so much are no longer the dazzling perfection they once were. The woman next to me mouthed every word with her eyes closed. For three hours the distance between now and then collapsed in a way that doesn't happen often after a certain age.

I don't know what it means that a handful of specific songs from thirty-odd years ago can feel so unaccountably healing. Or what it means to see the man whose poster hung in many of our bedrooms when we were teens, in real life, old now, needing to sit between songs. I wouldn't have missed this for the world, didn't mind the muddy shoes or being drenched despite the rain parka and umbrella.