Promise of the Road

Saturday, the last day in May.  The calendar doesn’t say the solstice begins until the end of June, but I think of the first of June as as the beginning of the Summer.

The venue was gorgeous and close.  Roaring Camp Railroads, this idyllic park in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  It’s a trip back to the 1900s  from the moment you leave the parking lot, we entered the grounds walking over a covered bridge draped with a bunting of red white and blue.  Once over the bridge a  green grassed meadow leads to a large stage bordered by the giant redwoods.  As the name hints at there is an old fashioned steam engine that runs from this park in the Santa Cruz Mountains through the Redwood Trees of Henry W Coe Park, all the way down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.  It is one of the oldest passenger narrow guage steam engines still in operation today.  This land was one of the first in our state to be purchased for the sole reason of saving those trees from the loggers ax for us to dance under on this very day.

I had both of my boys with me, my husband and my son.  It has been like the “cats in the cradle” with Nicholas these days.  He had grown into a man when I wasn’t looking and hasn’t had much time for his parents lately.   But somehow it seemed like we had gone back in time on this beautiful day in May.  The three of us sharing private family jokes, making up stories about the strangers we passed on the way to the stage and laughing easily.

Nicholas has always been interested in music from a very young age.  I remember how he bonded with his first friend over The Offspring, “Keep em separated!”  Nicholas embraced the music he grew up listening to in the car, memorized every word of the lyrics, read and could probably recite everything ever written on Led Zeppelin and Stevie Ray Vaughn, he made me proud.  Its wonderful to have so much in common with your child, it keeps you close, but maybe too close.  I guess I have to say there was a time that I thought that my son was an extension of myself, to carry on with all I had left unfinished, I had so much to learn still  about being a mother.  When he graduated from High School he left the house to go away to school and start his own life at a young age and we had a difficult transition.   I did not understand the process at the the time, we had a painful (for me) unraveling of our tight knit little family when he rebelled against my expectations, and cut the extension cord.  The perfect student, my son dropped out of school and took to the road to experience life untethered for the first time in a completely different way than anything I ever experienced.   I felt at the time as if I had lost everything when he pulled away.  But at some point my son grew tired of his own road and came back to California to start his career.  We had some awkward attempts to reunite, trying to fit squares into round holes.  But just like in his adolescence when we would be in throes of silence and one word answers in the car rides home from school it was music that opened up the lines of communication it would be music that would fit us back together.

It was the Summer Arts and Music Festival in 2010 about four years to the date of this festival that we had our mother and child reunion.  We had invited Nick to meet us  near where he was living in Humboldt County.  We listened to music and hung out with the band in their RV that day,   I remember this show fondly because it was the day that the music clicked us back into place and here we are  together again ready for another show in the shade of the giant redwoods.  I had my family, POTR all in the same place.

Lukas began his set on the stage of the Redwood Faire with his boots on, he slipped his boots off easily after like the third song, when in Santa Cruz as they say…. The setlist just as good as the last three shows on the run.  The band delighted the audience it was a dancing show.  At the end of the set before the encore Anthony gave a beautiful girl up front his drum sticks, I watched her smile this beautiful smile ear to ear as she held the sticks close to her chest.

The best shows are the shows that you have plenty of room at the front of the stage to dance without being crowded. The sound of an outdoor show is never all that perfect but there is something so magical about the sun shining on your face and your bare feet in the grass and dirt.  The wind blowing your hair gently and a spot up front and the company of all my favorite boys, this was heaven on earth.

This was the last of the planned4  show run.  The band will be off to the midwest, east coast,  away from their home in California (As in no where I can talk anyone into driving, The Old Rock House is a mere 31 hours hours by car, just saying-).  I am always a little wistful on the last show and I don’t know when I will be back in the front row dancing but I am getting better at just holding the music in my heart until the next time, I have tempered the show-blues.  I love the music but its so much more than that, it is a celebration of all that is simply good.  Seeing that girl holding Anthony’s sticks sharing the same joy I feel after every show is the magic, sharing the music.

For all of us Realers, we say life is something that happens between shows.  I thought about this as Nicholas told us stories about his bright future.  The things he has seen and the things he hopes for, we laughed some more together again, the Montara 3.  A lot has changed for us as a family, and for the band since they released their first full length record and traded their RV for the Bus.  We have shared a lot of music together over the years, we certainly shared some great music that afternoon on the last day of May.