Bands, Beards and Brothers

On Wednesday I was lucky enough to go see the Counting Crows with my brother, Ryan. He knows the promoter here locally and got us into the sold out show. This is a band I've been wanting to see for over a decade, but it never quite worked out. When we got to the show I realized that you don't exactly have assigned seats at a place like this. See, usually when we go see my brothers' bands we have a roped-off section with seats in the balcony where we can watch the show. It became pretty clear how spoiled I am. We aren't the tallest guys in the world, so as we tried to find our spots on the floor I was looking directly at some guy's back instead of at Adam Duritz. Not cool. And that guy in front of me tended to be a quite drunk college guy who really liked himself and had a vocabulary consisting of 50% R-rated words that really didn't make sense as he yelled incoherent phrases at the people around him. He also had a girl with him who seemed somehow impressed by Mr. Haughty. As he kept drinking heavily he started moving around a lot more and shared his beer with my shirt and shoes. Awesome.
But Ryan knows people. As we walked around the venue he strangely kept greeting and hugging shaggy-haired guys with huge beards. After three or four of these encounters I was wondering what the deal was with my brother's bearded friends. I figured if my lack of bushy facial hair was somehow making me even less cool. One of these guys happened to be the "bouncer guy" for the balcony section. Ryan chatted with him (and he chatted back extensively), and got us a spot standing behind the balcony seats where the ceiling is really low. (no problem for the vertically-challenged folks) It was marvelous! I could see everything I wanted to and I didn't even have to stand on my tip-toes. After we left the show and after I had pointed out that all his friends seemed to have foliage on their faces, Ryan ran into another one on the sidewalk. We both laughed as they shook hands. Hilarious.
The band was great and everything, but I'll tell ya, what I'll remember most from the night was joking around with Ryan.

And I haven't shaved since.


j/k

The girl I married . . . I think . . .

The 25th of April is our 10th wedding anniversary. I remember before we were married how well I thought I knew the future Mrs. HTF. I was sure that our 16 months or so of dating/engagement made me the definitive expert on Traci. Now a decade later I'm realizing more and more that I have a lot to learn and I continue to be surprised, almost exclusively in a great way. The girl I married thought that music stopped being created in 1979 (and should be played at a low volume) and that getting dressed up meant wearing your nicest flannel shirt and hiking shoes. (yes, she's quite Alaskan) I was good with all that - didn't matter much to me. I was lovin' her for other reasons. But last week I sat next to her at a rock concert as she rhythmically bobbed her head and belted out a few songs. She would occasionally smile at me with that grin that says, "surprise, I'll bet you didn't know I was secretly this cool." And her clothes were stylin'. (not that I'm any sort of expert on clothing style . . . as any of you know who me would attest) The girl I married also knew so little about current events that she couldn't tell me which two countries fought in the Iran/Iraq War. Now she zings me often with the "breaking news" of the day gleamed from significant reading of the big news web sites.

So I haven't been cool in many, many years (actually never), but I'm realizing that in addition to all the amazing things my wife is, that she's, . . . well . . . way cooler than me.

And I'm good with that.

Over the past six months or so especially, I've had to stop and stare as she downloaded amazing alt rock songs from iTunes or told me what was what in the presidential election. The way her coolness is increasing and mine is declining below zero . . . I'm just left to wonder . . . what'll this girl be like by the time we move into the nursing home?!